Bess Streeter Aldrich Quotes
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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.
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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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There was sturdy pioneer blood in Eleanor, the strain that meets crises clear-eyed and bravely.
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...Laura knew the price of motherhood to be pain and responsibility; the reward, love and pride.
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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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...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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In 1846 the prairie town of Oak River existed only in a settler's dream.
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Sometime in their lives, everybody wanted to go home.
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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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It is better to remember our love as it was in the springtime.
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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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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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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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The wheels where enormous wooden affairs, the back ones rounding up over the windows of the coach.
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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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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.
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Contentment lay in the place they had made for each other and for the children.
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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.