-
When I was young I had no means or time, and now I have the means and time, I have no youth.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.
Bess Streeter Aldrich
-
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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
Not all clever words are true. ... And inversely most things that are true are not clever.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
We're all inclined to think we have a monopoly on each new sensation that comes to us, that it's our own particular little grievance. But every feeling and every thought you may have now has probably been felt and thought by mothers from the time the world began.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich
-
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?
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
It took all their common sense and philosophy to face life these days. The two are synonymous.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
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, β love stays.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
You could not stop the winds and you could not stop Time. It went on and on,-and on.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
...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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich
-
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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
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,βor 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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
...For can you think how it would be, to never, never hear a meadow lark sing again...?
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
It is better to remember our love as it was in the springtime.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich
-
Poor Christine! She had long ago spent the days of her young motherhood in the marketplace, and now that they were all squandered, she had so few pleasant things left to remember. So she crouched low over the dull embers of a few half-memories in order to warm her old heart.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
Mrs. Schneiderman's theory of life was that earth held no sorrow that food could not heal.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
You can't describe love, Kathie, and you can't define it. Only it goes with you all your life. I think that love is more like a light that you carry. At first childish happiness keeps it lighted and after that romance. Then motherhood lights it and then duty...and maybe after that sorrow. You wouldn't think that sorrow could be a light would you, dearie? But it can. And then after that, service lights it. Yes...I think that is what love is to a woman...a lantern in her hand.
Bess Streeter Aldrich