Laura Ingalls Wilder Quotes - Page 3

The life of the earth comes up with a rush in the springtime. All the wild seeds of weed and thistle, the sprouts of vine and bush and tree, are trying to take the fields. Farmers must fight them with harrow and plow and hoe; they must plant the good seeds quickly.

Everything from the little house was in the wagon, except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not need to take these, because Pa could always make new ones.

Ma sighed gently and said, "A whole year gone, Charles." But Pa answered, cheerfully: "What's a year amount to? We have all the time there is.

Oh no, I never do much ironing, except the outside clothes. We must not iron out the fresh air and sunshine, you know. It is much more healthful not to, the doctors say.” Seriously, there is something very refreshing about sheets and pillow slips just fresh from the line, after being washed and dried in the sun and air. Just try them that way and see if your sleep is not sweeter.

All those golden autumn days the sky was full of wings. Wings beating low over the blue water of Silver Lake, wings beating high in the blue air far above it . . . bearing them all away to the green fields in the South.

Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. -Laura Ingalls Wilder, author (1867-1957)

I understood....that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.

These happy golden years are passing by, these happy golden years.

Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small, but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.

Wild animals would not stay in a country where there were so many people. Pa did not like to stay, either. He liked a country where the wild animals lived without being afraid.

Money hasn't any value of its own; it represents the stored up energy of men and women and is really just someone's promise to pay a certain amount of that energy.

If only I had some grease I could fix some kind of a light," Ma considered. "We didn't lack for light when I was a girl before this newfangled kerosene was ever heard of." "That's so," said Pa. "These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves--they're good things to have, but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.

People used to have time to live and enjoy themselves, but there is no time anymore for anything but work, work, work.

When Pa was at home the gun always lay across those two wooden hooks above the door. ... The gun was always loaded, and always above the door so that Pa could get it quickly and easily, any time he needed a gun.

The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.

She thought to herself, "This is now." She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

We heap up around us things that we do not need as the crow makes piles of glittering pebbles.

Many a good beginning makes a bad ending.

If the members of a home are ill-temperered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house. You may not know just what is wrong, but you wish to make your visit short.

We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.

So Pa sold the little house. He sold the cow and calf. He made hickory bows and fastened them upright to the wagon box. Ma helped him stretch white canvas over them.

Vices are simply overworked virtues.

There is nothing wrong with God's plan that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.

We must get rid of the habit of classing all women together politically and thinking of the 'woman's vote' as one and indivisible.

In these days when we feed those who are not hungry, we are stealing from those who are starving, even though the food is our own.