A White Bird Flying Quotes

“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...”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“...Uncle Harry Wentworth's dollar was turned deep under the sod. But though the sun shone on it and the rain fell, nothing ever came from it,—not a green thing nor a singing thing nor a human soul.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“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...”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“She wondered why she, herself, was always touched by such infinitesimal things. Their very homeliness and lack of worth seemed connecting the past with the present all the more. It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“...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...”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“I . . . you mean me?"

"Quite naturally, when I said, 'What about you, yourself,' I meant
you.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“Hours fly...Flowers die.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“...And how that girl did talk against time to make us think she was crazy about her Louie. She called attention to his honesty and his ability and his nose and the shape of his feet and his blue blood and his energy and what-have-you, and all the time, I was dying to quote that smart old Billy Shakespeare who was just as wordy as she was: 'Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“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.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“Humans are queer. A man, living and well, is ignored or criticized. Dying or dead, he is noticed and praised. Death sheds a temporary glamour over the poorest soul. It is as though in dying, he has accomplished something which life never gave him.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“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.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“Forks ceased their perpendicular traveling.”
― Bess Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“...For can you think how it would be, to never, never hear a meadow lark sing again...?”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“It took all their common sense and philosophy to face life these days. The two are synonymous.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“...Laura knew the price of motherhood to be pain and responsibility; the reward, love and pride.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“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.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“Life was meant to be warm and happy and lovely. Life was meant to be a sweet unhampered thing, joyful and gay. It should have everything in it,--wealth and travel and happiness and a career and friends and Allen. And if it couldn't have them all . . . oh, it ought to have Allen. It ought, anyway, to have Allen.... It had been as though in that one brief bitter-sweet moment, she had been swept again into some haven, had become the center of some great plan.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“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.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“The wheels where enormous wooden affairs, the back ones rounding up over the windows of the coach.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“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.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“Life is too terrible. How can one stand it? It holds such heartbreaking things."
"And that," said Allen simply " is one reason why two people who care for each other should meet it together”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“Poor Christine! She had long ago spent the days of her young motherhood in the marketplace, and now that they were all squandered, she had so few pleasant things left to remember. So she crouched low over the dull embers of a few half-memories in order to warm her old heart.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“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.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“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?”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“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.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“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.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying

“Past the old brick walls and lovely close-clipped hedges separating the different parts of the Italian gardens, the young people strolled to the rose arbors, scenes of a thousand thousand blossoms in the earlier part of the year. Retracing their steps back past the geranium beds, they walked on over the lush green grass to a sundial. Simultaneously and haltingly, as they made out the hewn words, they began to read aloud the quaint inscription cut from the gray stone:
"Hours Fly, Flowers Die...
New Days, New Ways, Love Stays."

The spoken words, deep with meaning, seemed to ring reverberatingly for a moment over the old timepiece which had seen so many hours fly, and so many flowers die.

Still facing the old sundial together, Allen slipped an arm about Laura and drew her close. "Stay Laura," he said suddenly. "Don't go. Stay and make a home with me . . . as they did. After all,--it's best."

For a brief moment Laura rested her check against Allen's arm, felt the touch of something big and beyond her. In that fraction of a minute she had the sensation of being swept on to some new existence, in which she was greater than herself, larger than humanity. The feeling of a great contentment came upon her. In that brief space of time she seemed to have slipped into her place in the scheme of things. It was as though she were the center of all existence, the reason for a Great Plan.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A White Bird Flying