Bess Streeter Aldrich Quotes

...Laura knew the price of motherhood to be pain and responsibility; the reward, love and pride.

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.

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.

Will laughed. 'You're quite a dreamer, Abbie-girl.'
Abbie did not laugh. She was suddenly very sober. 'You have to, Will.' She said it a little vehemently. 'You have to dream things out. It keeps a kind of ideal before you.

He [Sam] wrote it with great flourishes, his hand making many dizzy elliptical journeys before it settled down to make a elaborate 'E' with a curving tail as long as some prehistoric baboons.

You know, Grace, it's queer but I don't feel narrow. I feel broad. How can I explain it to you, so you would understand? I've seen everything ... and I've hardly been away from this yard ...
I've been part of the beginning and part of the growth. I've married ... and borne children and looked into the face of death. Is childbirth narrow, Grace? Or marriage? Or death? When you've experienced all those things, Grace, the spirit has traveled although the body has been confined. I think travel is a rare privilege and I'm glad you can have it. But not every one who stays at home is narrow and not every one who travels is broad. I think if you can understand humanity ... can sympathize with every creature ... can put yourself into the personality of every one ... you're not narrow ... you're broad.

It took all their common sense and philosophy to face life these days. The two are synonymous.

A person may encircle the globe with mind open only to bodily comfort. Another may live his life on a sixty-foot lot and listen to the voices of the universe.

...For can you think how it would be, to never, never hear a meadow lark sing again...?

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.

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.

Betty, who had found an old battered doll, was sitting quietly in the corner and industriously endeavoring to pick its one eye out

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.

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.

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.

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.

If the faith of all the mothers could blossom to its full fruition, there would be no unsuccessful men in the land.

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.

...The last name had been entered by Samuel Peters' agile pen with much shading of downward strokes and many extra corkscrew appendages...

All my girlhood I always planned to do something big ... something constructive. It's queer what ambitious dreams a girl has when she is young. I thought I would sing before big audiences or paint lovely pictures or write a splendid book. I always had that feeling in me of wanting to do something worth while. And just think, Laura ... now I am eighty and I have not painted nor written nor sung."
"But you've done lots of things, Grandma. You've baked bread ... and pieced quilts ... and taken care of your children."
Old Abbie Deal patted the young girl's hand. "Well ... well ... out of the mouths of babes. That's just it, Laura, I've only baked bread and pieced quilts and taken care of children. But some women have to, don't they? ... But I've dreamed dreams, Laura. All the time I was cooking and patching and washing, I dreamed dreams. And I think I dreamed them into the children ... and the children are carrying them out ... doing all the things I wanted to and couldn't.

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.

I've tried to keep pleasant," Mabel went on. "You don't know how I've tried. I have that verse pinned up on my dresser, about
The man worth while is the man who can smile,
When everything goes dead wrong."
"Take it down," Mother said cheerfully. "If there's a verse in the world that has been worked overtime, it's that one. I can't think of anything more inane than to smile when everything goes dead wrong, unless it is to cry when everything is passably right. That verse always seemed to me to be a surface sort of affair. Take it down and substitute 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.' That goes to the heart of things
when you feel that strength, then the dead-wrong things begin to miraculously right themselves.

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.

She thought of her younger days, - the gleam which seemed always ahead, - of the vague allure which accomplishing something in the arts had always held for her. And now she was nearly fifty and she was not to know the fruition of any of those hopes.
"Oh Will, I am so disappointed," she said to that invisible comrade who was only spirit and memory. "I can only feel those things, - not do them."
Isn't motherhood, itself, an accomplishment?
She knew that she made her own answer, and yet it gave her a sense of satisfaction and peace. Will might said it. It sounded like him.
"But I've made so many mistakes ... Will ... even in that."
You are a good mother, Abbie-girl."
Yes, it gave her a sense of peace and comfort.

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.

There are many memories. but I'll tell you the one I like to think of best of all. It's just a homely everyday thing, but to me it is the happiest of them all. It is evening time here in the old house and the supper is cooking and the table is set for the whole family. It hurts a mother, Laura, when the plates begin to be taken away one by one. First there are seven and then six and then five...and on down to a single plate. So I like to think of the table set for the whole family at supper time. The robins are singing in the cottonwoods and the late afternoon sun is shining across the floor... The children are playing out in the yard. I can hear their voices and happy laughter. There isn't much to that memory is there? Out of a lifetime of experiences you would hardly expect that to be the one I would choose as the happiest, would you? But it is.

Mrs. Schneiderman's theory of life was that earth held no sorrow that food could not heal ...

It takes a small town to keep you humble.

The wind was blowing from the east and the cedars bent before it, - blowing from the east like the breath of the war god. And Fred and Stanley were waving their hats gayly back to her, while the cedars bent and the wind blew from the east. They were like her own boys marching off to war. Children of her children, she loved them as she had loved their parents. Did a woman never get over loving? Deep love brought relatively deep heartaches. Why could not a woman of her age, whose family was raised, relinquish the hold upon her emotions? Why could she not have a peaceful old age, wherein there entered neither great affection nor its comrade, great sorrow? She had seen old women who seemed not to care as she was caring, whose emotions seemed to have died with their youth. Could she not be one of them? For a long time she stood in the window and looked at the cedars twisting before the east wind, like so many helpless women under the call from the east.

Then she laughed, a bubbling, deliciously girlish laugh, and the Thing relaxed its hold on her heart, turned up its toes, and died.

It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.

And now, she felt the presence of Grandmother Deal, as always--that same unexplainable presence of the woman who had mothered them all, whose love for her children and her children's children was so deep that after all the years it still seemed a tangible thing, delicate and rare, like the faint subtle odor of a fine perfume.

Could such things be, she wondered vaguely...? Could the loved dead come back? At a time like this, was the memory of them so keen to one sensitive like herself, that they only seemed to return and mingle with those to whom they had been devoted? Or was there in some way unknown to humans, a definite magical blending of these imperishable spirits with the mortal spirits of those they had so deeply loved?

Some girls are apparently born with dates; some through much personal activity, achieve them; but others seem by necessity to have dates thrust upon them.

As she wrote her pulse quickened to the pleasure of forming the phrases,--her blood warmed to the joy of the working. She was experiencing a return of the familiar sensation of happiness in constructing. Quite suddenly, in fancy she caught in the far distance a glimpse of silver wings. It gave her a warm thrill of gratification too deep for words. Immediately she knew through some inner consciousness, that no matter what the future would hold--joy or sorrow, happiness or grief--that no matter where life's paths would lead her--through sharp and stony ways or beside still waters--buried deep within her was an indestructible capacity to visualize a white bird flying. She might never get close to the way of its winging, but always there would be joy in lifting her eyes to the glory of its distant flight.

You can't evade a thing. Those who try to get around it are weak. Those who meet it gallantly are strong. So many women try to dodge life. They don't economize because it's inconvenient. They don't work because it's tiring. They don't have a child because it's painful. They don't look at the dead because it's saddening. Face them all, Laura. Face them squarely and meet them gallantly... as your grandmother did. For every one of the old experiences will be there... birth... marriage... death... disappointment... grief... little joys... little sorrows. You'll have to meet them all. It's part of the story...

There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication.

...Let me tell you something, Allen. I've been around now, enough to know there are some bigger things in the world than marriage and a prosaic settling down under one roof."

"Now, I'll tell you something." He sat up straighter under the wheel. "There isn't, - not a thing - when it's two people who really care, and, and settling down under one roof, as you say, is the beginning of a real home. There's nothing finer...

..Like the cavities of missing teeth in some giant denture, into which new ones were to be fitted.

In 1846 the prairie town of Oak River existed only in a settler's dream.

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 ...

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.

It is better to remember our love as it was in the springtime.

And of course, everybody thinks it's just like it used to be when the Indians jazzed around and played 'You're it' with arrows.

...Mabel put on the boiled potatos, unmashed, the stewed tomatos, some inferior dried beef, and some bread that plainly said, 'Darling, I am growing old'.

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.

That was the trouble of being old. Your body no longer obeyed you. It did unruly and unreasonable things. An eye suddenly might not see for a moment. Your knees gave out at the wrong time, so that when you thought you were walking north, you might find yourself going a little northwest. Your brain, too, had that same flighty trick. You might be speaking of something and forget it temporarily, - your mind going off at a little to the northwest, too, so to speak.

Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.

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.

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.

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.

Home was something besides so much lumber and plaster. You built your thoughts into the frame work. You planted a little of your heart with the trees and the shrubbery.