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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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
Then she laughed, a bubbling, deliciously girlish laugh, and the Thing relaxed its hold on her heart, turned up its toes, and died.
Bess Streeter Aldrich
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It was queer how it all hurt you--how the odor of the night, the silver sheen of the moon, the moist feeling of the dew, the whispering of the night breeze, how somewhere down in your throat it hurt you.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
They are the most painful tears in the world ... the tears of the aged ... for they come from dried beds where the emotions have long burned low.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
Sometime in their lives, everybody wanted to go home.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
...Laura knew the price of motherhood to be pain and responsibility; the reward, love and pride.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
Things last so much longer than people.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
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.
Bess Streeter Aldrich
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...Uncle Harry Wentworth's dollar was turned deep under the sod. But though the sun shone on it and the rain fell, nothing ever came from it,—not a green thing nor a singing thing nor a human soul.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
Hair, to Tillie, meant nothing by way of being a woman's crowning glory. It was merely, as the dictionary so ably states, small horny, fibrous tubes with bulbous roots, growing out of the skins of mammals; and it was meant to be combed down as flat as possible and held in place with countless wire hairpins.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
If the faith of all the mothers could blossom to its full fruition, there would be no unsuccessful men in the land.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
You have to dream things out. It keeps a kind of an ideal before you. You see it first in your mind and then you set about to try and make it like the ideal. If you want a garden,-why, I guess you've got to dream a garden.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
Ella held herself rigidly against all emotion until she arrived at the dark haven of her room. Then she threw herself across her bed and cried because life was such a tragic thing.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
There was sturdy pioneer blood in Eleanor, the strain that meets crises clear-eyed and bravely.
Bess Streeter Aldrich
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And so they discussed it seriously, Abbie who knew that one may laugh with a child but at him, and Laura, who knew that Grandma was one unfailing source of sympathy and understanding in a world which was beginning to be critical.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
In 1846 the prairie town of Oak River existed only in a settler's dream.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
Abbie would stop in her work and utter a prayer for him,—and, sent as it were from the bow of a mother's watchful care, bound by the cord of a mother's love, the little winged arrow on its flight must have reached Some one,—Somewhere.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
Part of Mother went with them. It is an acrobatic feat that only mothers can understand, this ability to be with every child.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
Contentment lay in the place they had made for each other and for the children.
Bess Streeter Aldrich -
Aunt Grace was leaving.... Looking after her a moment, Laura had another feeling of tenderness toward her. How we live our lives side by side with those whom we never know or understand.
Bess Streeter Aldrich