A Wilder Rose Quotes

“After a few months, I was no longer wildly romantic about him. But he gave me a warm place to park my heart while I went about my work.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“Do any of us ever outgrow those old childhood hurts, or do they gnaw and fester in our spirits the whole length of our lives?”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“every American is governed only by the principle of personal responsibility and that his or her most important freedom is the absolute freedom to flourish or fail.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“generosity as a means of controlling someone is no gift at all. It’s a curse.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“Don’t part with your illusions; when they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“Stories are never a waste of time,”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“I’m sure of one thing,” she said earnestly. “It hurts to—to let go of anything beautiful. But something will come to take its place, something different, of course, but better. The future’s always better than we can possibly think it will be . . . We ought to live confidently. Because whatever’s ahead, it’s going to be better than we’ve had.” Rose Wilder Lane Diverging Roads”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“Farmers could do better if the government didn’t meddle and the free market was allowed to take its course. And we could all grow at least some of our food, if we invested a bit of work.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“if we are aiming to be genuinely self-reliant, we must learn to embrace uncertainty and anxiety. If we fail, there will be nothing to break our fall—nothing but whatever cushion we have managed to create for ourselves.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“Win this war? Of course Americans will win this war. This is only a war; there is more than that. Five generations of Americans have led the Revolution, and the time is coming when Americans will set this whole world free.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“I’m sure of one thing,” she said earnestly. “It hurts to—to let go of anything beautiful. But something will come to take its place, something different, of course, but better. The future’s always better than we can possibly think it will be . . . We ought to live confidently. Because whatever’s ahead, it’s going to be better than we’ve had.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“We were both dismayed by the freedoms the farmers were required to give up in return for the cash the government gave them. If you wanted to grow potatoes on your farm, for example, the Roosevelt administration would tell you how many bushels of potatoes you could grow and sell, tax free. Your tax-free potatoes, when they went to market, would go in a federal package, bearing a federal stamp, by permission of a federal bureau. If you wanted to grow and sell more potatoes than the law allowed, you had to pay a tax of forty-five cents a bushel. If you got caught bootlegging potatoes, you and your customer would be fined a thousand dollars. Get caught again and you went to jail—and your customer went as well.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“I understood why it might seem to Dawn as if I were yielding my freedom to provide a home for John. But I wasn’t, not really. I was choosing, freely, to commit my time, my work, my attention, my life-energy to the boy. In choosing, I was exercising my freedom.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“Please” would have cost too much.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“Right after the war, in 1919, she’d been hired by the Red Cross Publicity Bureau. She was assigned to travel through devastated Europe and the Balkans and write newspaper articles that would persuade compassionate Americans to contribute to the rebuilding process—through the Red Cross, of course.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“every American is governed only by the principle of personal responsibility and that his or her most important freedom is the absolute freedom to flourish or fail. The question each person must answer is whether that freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden, the price of individual self-reliance and insecurity. Yes, insecurity. Because if we are aiming to be genuinely self-reliant, we must learn to embrace uncertainty and anxiety. If we fail, there will be nothing to break our fall—nothing but whatever cushion we have managed to create for ourselves.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“The government is too big and too far away,” he said. “Those men in Moscow, they are city men. They cannot know how we live and work, or how people live and work in the next village or on the other side of the mountains. Why doesn’t the government content itself with governing and let us alone? We don’t need their ‘reforms.’” That chance conversation with a communist in a communist village changed the way I saw Communism, and I found myself glad that the fates had earlier dealt me such a severe case of influenza that I was thereby restrained from naively pledging allegiance to the Party. It was neither socialism nor communism but good, old-fashioned American individualism I cherished—American freedom of thought and action, American democracy, and the spirit of American enterprise. I was damned sick of the Old World and glad to be going home to the New.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“earnestly.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“I once read that the sociologist Jane Addams called this burden the “family claim,” two words that explain it well enough: a bond—no, a bondage, braided of strands of guilt, duty, and affection.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“I was longing, instead, for the feelings I’d had when I first met him, wishing I could love with that sweetly giddy, self-forgetting exhilaration just once more in my life and knowing, somehow, that I wouldn’t. I was, I think, longing for my younger self, full of optimism and joy and impatient for life, for adventure, for risk.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“It isn’t money that moves the world,” she wrote to Crane in 1966. “It is faith, conviction, ardor, fanaticism in action.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“Knowing the price and choosing to pay it and keep on paying it, over and over again—that’s what makes him invincible.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“as Thomas Paine said, it has never been discovered how to make a man unknow his knowledge.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“wrote that every American is governed only by the principle of personal responsibility and that his or her most important freedom is the absolute freedom to flourish or fail. The question each person must answer is whether that freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden, the price of individual self-reliance and insecurity. Yes, insecurity. Because if we are aiming to be genuinely self-reliant, we must learn to embrace uncertainty and anxiety. If we fail, there will be nothing to break our fall—nothing but whatever cushion we have managed to create for ourselves.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“Write your passion and somebody will pay you for it.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“money is a matter of faith—as thirty-six inches are a yard only because multitudes agree to that measure of length and keep that agreement.” If the agreement was broken, “faith was gone, and any tangible thing to eat, to wear, to shelter one’s body from the weather was more valuable than any number of pieces of paper, which were only symbols of a lost faith.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“whatever is ahead will be better than what you have now.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“Courage. Whatever the storm, we must remain invincible.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“Writing isn’t magic, it’s work; earning a living as a writer means showing up at the typewriter every day, whether you feel like it or not.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose

“the trouble with my life was that it had no strong central storyline—at least, certainly not a conventional one, with love and marriage as its main theme. Just when I thought I’d found something to hold on to, the plot was altered by events I couldn’t control.”
― Susan Wittig Albert, A Wilder Rose