Samantha Vespertino > Samantha's Quotes

“Behind Caroline was her schoolroom full of bright, eager students. God had given them to her as a gift, to show her that the sacrifices she’d made did have meaning. His purposes for her life would be partly fulfilled in them, and in those children’s futures.”
― Lynn Austin, Candle in the Darkness

“I wanted to weep. Everywhere I went, it seemed that people wanted to discuss slavery, yet they talked about it as if it was an abstract concept. It wasn’t abstract to me. Slaves were real-life people with individual faces and souls. I knew some of those faces, loved some of those souls, and it broke my heart to be reminded of the truth about them—that Josiah and Tessie weren’t allowed to be man and wife; that Grady had been torn without warning from his mother’s arms; that Eli could be whipped for secretly preaching about Jesus in the pine grove or killed for knowing how to read.”
― Lynn Austin, Candle in the Darkness

“let Him run things the way He knows best, according to His will. Trust Him, Missy. Trust that everything you done for Him and everything you gave up for Him has a purpose. God will give it all meaning in the end.”
― Lynn Austin, Candle in the Darkness

“Guard your heart, son,” Eli said in a hushed voice. “That’s what God looks at—your heart. Most folks look at the outside things, like the color of your skin. But God looks at your heart.”
― Lynn Austin, Candle in the Darkness

“The war has changed you, too, Caroline. Your faith is stronger, your compassion deeper, your love more intense than ever before. It's as if all the qualities I saw in you and fell in love with have been refined and purified.”
― Lynn Austin, Candle in the Darkness

“Even when bad things happen, He can use them for good.”
― Lynn Austin, Candle in the Darkness

“We want to make our own plans and then pray, ‘My will be done, if you please Massa Jesus, in earth, as it is in my plans.’ You got to put your life in Jesus’ hands. Trust that in the end, whatever happens, He still in control.”
― Lynn Austin, Candle in the Darkness

“Seem like it be a mighty hard thing to change someone’s mind,” he said. “Most folks won’t change their mind unless they have a change of heart first.” “Well, then . . . how do I change their heart?” “You can’t, Missy Caroline,” he said gently. “Only Massa Jesus can change folks’ hearts.”
― Lynn Austin, Candle in the Darkness

“Can’t never go by your feelings. Got to go by the word of the Lord.”
― Lynn Austin, Candle in the Darkness

“What's it like to fall in love, Tessie?" I asked.
She gazed into the darkness for a long moment, then her smile widened. "Well, when you see that certain man you heart flies like paper on the wind--don't matter if you just see him one minute ago or one year ago. When you with him, ain't nothing or nobody else in the whole world but him. You might be walking down the same old street you walk on every day, but if you with him, your feet don't hardly touch the ground anymore, like you just floating on a little cloud. And, honey, you want his arms to be around you more than you want air to breathe.”
― Lynn Austin, Candle in the Darkness

“Faith don't come in a bushel basket, Missy. It come one step at a time. Decide to trust Him for one little thing today, and before you know it, you find out He's so trustworthy you be putting your whole life in His hands.”
― Lynn Austin, Candle in the Darkness

“We were meant to love people, and we need to accept their love in return. Otherwise, we ain’t really living.”
― Lynn Austin, Fire by Night

“we need to ask God how He wants us to live in the times He has appointed for us. If we work with Him, using the gifts and the strength He provides, then we’ll help build His kingdom, for His glory, here on earth. And that’s really the only thing that matters.”
― Lynn Austin, Fire by Night

“Until Gettysburg," she continued, "I was working for the wrong reasons. At first it was to prove myself worthy in someone's eyes. Later it was out of guilt, trying to find atonement in God's eyes. But atonement is free, never earned. And I've learned that the only person I need to please with my life is God.”
― Lynn Austin, Fire by Night

“It takes less courage to end your life in a burst of glory than to face the mistakes you’ve made and start over.”
― Lynn Austin, Fire by Night

“People are always thinking they can use the Lord to get their own way-- all they have to do is pray and God's gonna take away all their suffering and give them what they whatever they ask for. But it don't work that way. God's doing His business, and it's up to us to be serving Him, not the other way around."

Then why do people pray at all? My papa asked Jesus to help him escape with me when I was just a little girl. But Jesus didn't help us."

Praying ain't about asking for your own way. It's all about talking things over with God, just like you and me are talking things over. In the end, you have to be trusting the Lord to do what's best."

So the Lord thought it was best that my papa died and my mama was sold?"

Delia slowly shook her head. "I don't know, honey, I just don't know. The hardest thing of all to understand is why a loving God keeps letting us suffer... I don't know all the answers myself. I seen my share of suffering, believe me. But there two things I do know for sure. One is that God loves us... And the second thing is that God's always in control of everything that happens. When bad things come our way and it starts looking like He don't love us, all I can say is that maybe we ain't knowing everything He knows."

Kitty's tears started falling again. "I still don't understand."

Remember what you told me about the fighting up in Charleston? How you was standing on that porch, not able to see what's going on? This here's the same thing. We're standing in the smoke, hearing the noise [of the battle] all around us, and we don't know what God's doing because we can't see things clearly as He sees them. But He's gonna make everything turn our okay when the smoke clears. When it does, God's gonna be the winner and all our suffering here on earth is gonna finall make sense. We're gonna look in Jesus' face and say, 'O Lord, it was worth it all.”
― Lynn Austin, A Light to My Path

“She concluded with a statement of her philosophy: “Running through all the stories, like a golden thread, is the same thought of the values of life. They were courage, self reliance, independence, integrity and helpfulness. Cheerfulness and humor were handmaids to courage.” Describing her parents’ travails, she wrote: When possible, they turned the bad into good. If not possible, they endured it. Neither they nor their neighbors begged for help. No other person, nor the government, owed them a living. They owed that to themselves and in some way they paid the debt. And they found their own way. Their old fashioned character values are worth as much today as they ever were to help us over the rough places. We need today courage, self reliance and integrity.107”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures and to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Houses are real, deep, emotional things.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Rose once jotted down a quotation she attributed to her mother: “I don’t know which is more heartbreaking, a dream un[ful]filled or a dream realized.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“His most remarkable gift, as Laura saw it, was a deep and profound contentment with what he had.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“After her first book was successful and she received pleas from children around the country to continue the story, she said, I began to think what a wonderful childhood I had had. How I had seen the whole frontier, the woods, the Indian country of the great plains, the frontier towns, the building of railroads in wild, unsettled country, homesteading and farmers coming in to take possession. I realized that I had seen and lived it all—all the successive phases of the frontier, first the frontiersman, then the pioneer, then the farmers and the towns. Then I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history. That the frontier was gone, and agricultural settlements had taken its place when I married a farmer. It seemed to me that my childhood had been much richer and more interesting than that of children today, even with all the modern inventions and improvements.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“But as adults, we have come to see that her autobiographical novels were not only fictionalized but brilliantly edited, in a profound act of American myth-making and self-transformation. As unpublished manuscripts, letters, and documents have come to light, we have begun to apprehend the scope of her life, a story that needs to be fully told, in its historical context, as she lived it. That tale is different from the one she wrote. It is an adult story of poverty, struggle, and reinvention—a great American drama in three acts.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“She was never overcome by drabness or squalor. She never glamorized anything; yet she saw the loveliness in everything.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“I thought about the Apache women. Like the sandstone altar on which they had died, the shape of their lives had been determined years before—before the horses began their gallop, their sorrel bodies arching for that final collision. Long before the warriors’ leap it was decided how the women would live and how they would die. By the warriors, by the women themselves. Decided.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“There was a pause, then more word appeared - words I hadn't known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I'd been searching my whole life for them.

You were my child. I should have protected you.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“They were her words. But hers or not, those words, which had so comforted and healed me, were hollow. I don't believe they were faithless, but sincerity failed to give them substance, and they were swept away by other, stronger currents.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“There was a boldness in not editing for consistency, in not ripping out either the one page or the other. To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s. I have often wondered if the most powerful words I wrote that night came not from anger or rage, but from doubt: I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“If the first fall was God's will, whose was the second?”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“But Dr. Kerry was right: it wasn't the clothes that made this face, this woman, different. It was something behind her eyes, something in the set of her jaw-a hope or belief or conviction-that a life is not a thing unalterable. I don't have a word for what it was I saw, but I suppose it was something like faith.”
― Tara Westover, Educated