Bess Streeter Aldrich Quotes
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..Like the cavities of missing teeth in some giant denture, into which new ones were to be fitted.
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For though love has been ridiculed and disgraced, exchanged and bartered, dragged through the courts, and sold for thirty pieces of silver, the bright, steady glow of its fire still shines on the hearth-stones of countless homes.
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When I was young I had no means or time, and now I have the means and time, I have no youth.
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Biggest affirmative argument I know in favor of 'If a man die, shall he live again?' is just the way you feel inside you that nothin' can stop you from livin' on.
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Junior was eleven. The statement is significant. There are a few peevish people in the world who believe that all eleven-year-old boys ought to be hung. Others, less irritable, think that gently chloroforming them would seem more humane. A great many good-natured folks contend that incarceration for a couple of years would prove the best way to dispose of them.
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And so a greater share of the night, Laura shed tears into her soft white pillow. Some of them were for old Oscar Lutz.... Some of them were for the general sad fact that hours fly and flowers die. But most of them were shed because of her own sudden and definite realization that even though there come new days and new ways, – love stays.
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Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.
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Seventy-five years ago a young woman kept a diary in which she wrote some of her innermost thoughts, many of the daily happenings, and all of the weather. This story is the fictionalized version of the real diary. The thoughts more or less trite pedantic have been curtailed, the happenings (for obvious reasons) sometimes changed, but the weather remains practically intact. ...So step out of the yellowed diary, Linnie Colsworth,.... Recreate yourself from the fading ink of it's pages and help us understand something of the stanch heart that beat under those hard little stays, bidding you defy convention three-quarters of a century ago.
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You could not stop the winds and you could not stop Time. It went on and on,-and on.
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Many hands were willing to perform the last tender ministrations. It is characteristic of the small town and rural districts. Sympathy there takes concrete form. It becomes cakes and cinnamon rolls and sitting up nights, husking corn and washing dishes and closing the eyes of the neighboring dead.
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And now Abbie had the new experience of attempting to keep another person courageous. It was more trying than to keep up her own spirits. Why must she always be strong for other people?
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Except for our higher order of minds we are like the little moles under the earth carrying out blindly the work of digging, thinking our own dark passage-ways constitute all there is to the world.
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It took all their common sense and philosophy to face life these days. The two are synonymous.
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Small wonder that love would break under circumstances like these. Standing there in the soddie door, she seemed two personalities. One argued bitterly that it was impossible for love to keep going when there was no hope for the future, suggested that there was no use trying to keep it going. The other said sternly that marriage was not the fulfillment of a passion, - marriage was the fulfillment of love. And love was sometimes pleasure and sometimes duty.
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Our souls may all be equal in the sight of the Lord, but our gumption and ingenuity ain't. So the results of man's labor will never be equal.
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...And how that girl did talk against time to make us think she was crazy about her Louie. She called attention to his honesty and his ability and his nose and the shape of his feet and his blue blood and his energy and what-have-you, and all the time, I was dying to quote that smart old Billy Shakespeare who was just as wordy as she was: 'Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
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She slipped silently out of the kitchen, climbed the wide, curving stairway, and went into her room. Then she turned the lock and sat down in a low rocking-chair by the window. She was resentfully, flamingly angry, as good, high-minded people sometimes become angry. She was deeply, quiveringly hurt, as sensible, sunshiny people, who do not go about looking for slights, are sometimes hurt.
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...For can you think how it would be, to never, never hear a meadow lark sing again...?
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Sometime in their lives, everybody wanted to go home.
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If I can't see stories in the lives of the people around me,--I just couldn't see them anywhere. If I can't see drama in humanity near me, I guess I couldn't detect it in humans far away.
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For some reason little Laura Deal continued to be Abbie's favorite grandchild. The little girl answered Abbie's deep love for her with an affection equally sincere,—or perhaps it was the other way. Perhaps the fact that Laura held such admiration for her grandnmother enkindled its answer in Abbie's heart. From the time Laura was five she had brought her grandmother little stories of her own composition. Abbie had them all in safe keeping, just as she had everything else which had ever come into her possession.
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It is better to remember our love as it was in the springtime.
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The whole period seemed to come alive to her sensitive imagination,--the people of the times, substantial and courageous, walked and talked with her. For the first time she was sensing to-day a romance in her own Midwest, a glamour over the lives of her own people. She wished she could hold to her heart the fleeting sensation until she could get pencil and paper. She wished she could catch it and hold it between the covers of a book.
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A piece of rusty pump and a pile of stones,--all that was left of the place he and Marthy had called home. Home. What a big word that was. Lots of attempts made lately to belittle it. Plenty of fun poked at it. Young folks laughed about it,--called it a place to park. Everybody wanted to get some place else, seemed like. They'd find out. They'd understand some day. When they got old, they'd know. They'd want to go home. sometimes in their lives everybody wanted to go home.