Nancy Byrd Turner Quotes

She saw at last that her strange son was fired by some purpose which he would carry out or die. Seeing that, she finally currendered--the first casualty of the Revolution in Virginia. In so far as she herself realized, the sacrifice was made for George Wahington, but subconsciously she made it for his cause--just as unaware and obeying by blind instinct the laws of her nature, she had made him to begin with out of stuff that had been in the wearving a thousand years.

Under our thatch, friend, place shall abide for you, touch but the latch, friend, the door will swing wide for you!

Death is only an old door/Set in a garden wall.

Distinctively gentle he was, and trustworthy, and of special courtesy. His great physical strength was never used in combat, men remembered, except when needed for the defence of the weak. In the last hours, when his mind went roving over the past, he said to someone who stoody by: 'I thank god that in all my life I never struck a man in anger...Ishould have killed my antagonist and then his blood, at this awful moment, would have lain heavily on my soul....Idie at peace with all mankind.' (Referring to Augustine Washington, husband of Mary Ball and father of George Washington.)

Oh, heart, let's never grow too old To smile anew, when Christmas comes, At tassels red and tinsel thread, And tarlatan bags f sugarplums.

The trouble is, we are incurable sentimentalists. We insist on makin over historical characters to suit our preconceived notions of what they should be, chipping, sandpapering, and polishing each personality until it assumes what we consider the proper contour and color.

Easter's nearly here, now -
Sing, world, sing!

It is safe to say that not all the cooking and sewing and farm management of an entire year signified as much hard work as the job of keeping those five children alive for a month. Their mother did it, though,...with never a murmur. It was not merely a part of her life's routine; it was her life itself.

It is perhaps too much to ask of hero worshippers that they peer back of the hero and consider the principal factor that shaped him for glory--that is, whoever it was that had charge of his grubby little boyhood.

The Bookshop has a thousand books,
All colors, hues, and tinges,
And every cover is a door
That turns on magic hinges.

Common sense...was one of the strongest ingredients of her character. She knew well enough that her fate was not to be an iota different from the fate of all mothers since the world began. her five would all go, somehow and somewhere, one by one. She would do what she coult to manage the goings, no doubt about that, but meanwhile their food must be prepared and their buttons sewed on to the best of her marked ability. And so they were.

But this woman was all mother. A stern one, perhaps, and autocratic at times, and somewhat hard--but after all and in spite of all, intensely maternal. She did not look to large, far issues, nor did she know how to deal with subtleties and potentialityies; her business, from first to last, was the old elemental business of bearing and rearing. The sod, the hearth, the young that she had brought into the world, those were the trusts committed to her, and according to her best lights she was faithful to them.