Bess Streeter Aldrich Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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.
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In 1846 the prairie town of Oak River existed only in a settler's dream.
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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.
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...Laura knew the price of motherhood to be pain and responsibility; the reward, love and pride.
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Mrs. Schneiderman's theory of life was that earth held no sorrow that food could not heal.
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It is better to remember our love as it was in the springtime.
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Sometime in their lives, everybody wanted to go home.
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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.
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Then she laughed, a bubbling, deliciously girlish laugh, and the Thing relaxed its hold on her heart, turned up its toes, and died.
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If the faith of all the mothers could blossom to its full fruition, there would be no unsuccessful men in the land.
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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.
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Part of Mother went with them. It is an acrobatic feat that only mothers can understand, this ability to be with every child.
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Things last so much longer than people.
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The wheels where enormous wooden affairs, the back ones rounding up over the windows of the coach.
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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.
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Contentment lay in the place they had made for each other and for the children.
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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.