Mother Mason Quotes

“Junior was eleven. The statement is significant. There are a few peevish people in the world who believe that all eleven-year-old boys ought to be hung. Others, less irritable, think that gently chloroforming them would seem more humane. A great many good-natured folks contend that incarceration for a couple of years would prove the best way to dispose of them.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason

“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.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason

“...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'.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason

“Betty, who had found an old battered doll, was sitting quietly in the corner and industriously endeavoring to pick its one eye out”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason

“Katherine it was who took upon herself the complete charge of [Junior's] speech. Not an insignificant "have went" nor an infinitesimal "I seen" ever escaped the keen ears of his eldest sister, who immediately corrected him. Mother sometimes thought Katherine a little severe when, in the interest of proper speaking, she would stop him in the midst of an exciting account of a home-run. There were times, thought Mother, when the spirit of the thing was so much more important than the flesh in which it was clothed.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason

“Then she laughed, a bubbling, deliciously girlish laugh, and the Thing relaxed its hold on her heart, turned up its toes, and died.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich , Mother Mason

“Part of Mother went with them. It is an acrobatic feat that only mothers can understand, this ability to be with every child.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason

“She slipped silently out of the kitchen, climbed the wide, curving stairway, and went into her room. Then she turned the lock and sat down in a low rocking-chair by the window. She was resentfully, flamingly angry, as good, high-minded people sometimes become angry. She was deeply, quiveringly hurt, as sensible, sunshiny people, who do not go about looking for slights, are sometimes hurt.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason

“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.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason

“Work is good," he said to himself. "Work is healthful and right. It keeps men sane and well balanced. No one with health and strength should step out of the ranks.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason

“Contentment lay in the place they had made for each other and for the children.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason

“We're all inclined to think we have a monopoly on each new sensation that comes to us, that it's our own particular little grievance. But every feeling and every thought you may have now has probably been felt and thought by mothers from the time the world began.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason

“There was sturdy pioneer blood in Eleanor, the strain that meets crises clear-eyed and bravely.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason

“Mother had that peculiar God-given gift of imagination so keen that the printed word became to her a vivid, living reality. It was as though, while her body stayed at home and cared for the children, her spirit had climbed far mountain peaks and sailed into strange harbors.

Because of Barrie and Kipling and scores of others she had been intimately, sensitively in touch with the places and peoples of the world. She had stood on wind-swept, heather-grown Scottish moors, and broken bread in the little gray homes of the Thrums weavers. She had watched, fascinated, the slow-moving, red-lacquered bullock carts, veiled and curtained, creep over the yellow-brown sands of India. She had walked under brilliant stars down long, long trails in clear, cold, silent places, and she had strolled through groves of feathery flowering loong-yen trees of China. She had sensed to the finger tips the beauty of the witching, seductive moon-filled nights of Hawaii, and with strained eyes and chilling heart she had watched for the return of the fishing fleet on the wild-wind banks of Labrador.

Yes, the warp of Mother's life had been restricted to keeping the home for Henry and the children. But the woof of the texture had been fashioned from the wind clouds and star drifts of the heavens.

As she had touched her life with all the lives of these peoples of the earth, for the time being sunk her own personality in theirs, she had come to the conviction that, fundamentally, there was nothing in life that could not be found in this little inland town.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mother Mason