Caroline Quotes

“You may be afraid, but you may not let your fear chase you away from what must be done.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“All her life she had longed to breach that pale and hazy boundary between enough and plenty.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Though Wilder blamed her family’s departure from Kansas on “blasted politicians” ordering white squatters to vacate Osage lands, no such edict was issued over Rutland Township during the Ingallses’ tenure there. Quite the reverse is true: only white intruders in what was known as the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma were removed to make way for the displaced Osages arriving from Kansas. (Wilder mistakenly believed that her family’s cabin was located forty—rather than the actual fourteen—miles from Independence, an error that placed the fictional Ingalls family in the area affected by the removal order.) Rather, Charles Ingalls’s decision to abandon his claim was almost certainly financial, for Gustaf Gustafson did indeed default on his mortgage. The exception: Unlike their fictional counterparts, the historical Ingalls family’s decision to leave Wisconsin and settle in Kansas was not a straightforward one. Instead it was the eventual result of a series of land transactions that began in the spring of 1868, when Charles Ingalls sold his Wisconsin property to Gustaf Gustafson and shortly thereafter purchased 80 acres in Chariton County, Missouri, sight unseen. No one has been able to pinpoint with any certainty when (or even whether) the Ingalls family actually resided on that land; a scanty paper trail makes it appear that they actually zigzagged from Kansas to Missouri and back again between May of 1868 and February of 1870. What is certain is that by late February of 1870 Charles Ingalls had returned the title to his Chariton County acreage to the Missouri land dealer, and so for simplicity’s sake I have chosen to follow Laura Ingalls Wilder’s lead, contradicting history by streamlining events to more closely mirror the opening chapter of Little House on the Prairie, and setting this novel in 1870, a year in which the Ingalls family’s presence in Kansas is firmly documented.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“How different it must feel to be a man: built solid through, with everything beneath the skin belonging solely to yourself. Did he ever envy what she could take into herself, how much she could contain? Could he comprehend all it meant for a woman to hold herself open for her husband, her children?”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Be thankful for what is given. Caroline heard the words in her mother’s voice. No matter if it is not enough, be thankful.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“we must all learn to do things we don’t want to do. You may be afraid, but you may not let your fear chase you away from what must be done.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“How many miles had they come? Less than halfway, and already Caroline had the sense that a separation such as this could put more than miles between folks, could right this minute be working changes she might not be entirely conscious of and might never realize at all unless she and Eliza saw each other again.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“I don’t see how sugar could make that cornbread any sweeter than the prints of your hands already have.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Their trust in her was built of thousands upon thousands of moments already past. She was Ma, and that in itself was enough.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“vista no wider than their own sunbonnets.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“It was not a sack, but rather a circle of denim that would spread itself flat with the cord fully unlaced. Seven deep pockets, each holding one color, pinwheeled from a center humped with plain cuttings of flannel, buckram, and the like.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“it was not going she dreaded—only leaving.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Perfect silence is a safe resort, when such control cannot be attained.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“A woman can resolve that, whatever happens, she will not speak till she can do it in a calm and gentle manner,”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Time, Caroline decided, could be trusted to measure the distance between meals, and nothing else. But a mile was always a mile, no matter how long it took to traverse. Days spent on the road were best measured in miles.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Why doesn’t Sunday ever wait until I’m tired?”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Nor did she know which of them to reach for first. She had not arms enough to shelter them both at once. Laura was still so little, but Mary was plainly smothering in her own fear. It did not seem fair that each could have only half of her, nor that her heart should favor one side of her chest. Not since Laura was newly born had Caroline felt so keenly that she might not be mother enough for two. And soon there would be a third. The thought made her want to cry out for her own ma. Aside from the vanity of new hair ribbons, Caroline realized,”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Author’s Note Caroline is a marriage of fact and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fiction. I have knowingly departed from Wilder’s version of events only where the historical record stands in contradiction to her stories. Most prominently: Census records, as well as the Ingalls family Bible, demonstrate that Caroline Celestia Ingalls was born in Rutland Township, Montgomery County, Kansas on August 3, 1870. (Wilder, not anticipating writing a sequel to Little House in the Big Woods, set her first novel in 1873 and included her little sister. Consequently, when Wilder decided to continue her family’s saga by doubling back to earlier events, Carrie’s birth was omitted from Little House on the Prairie to avoid confusion.) No events corresponding to Wilder’s descriptions of a “war dance” in the chapter of Little House on the Prairie entitled “Indian War-Cry” are known to have occurred in the vicinity of Rutland Township during the Ingalls family’s residence there. Drum Creek, where Osage leaders met with federal Indian agents in the late summer of 1870 and agreed peaceably to sell their Kansas lands and relocate to present-day Oklahoma, was nearly twenty miles from the Ingalls claim. I have therefore adopted western scholar Frances Kay’s conjecture that Wilder’s family was frightened by the mourning songs sung by Osage women as they grieved the loss of their lands and ancestral graves in the days following the agreement. In this instance, like so many others involving the Osages, the Ingalls family’s reactions were entirely a product of their own deep prejudices and misconceptions.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“it was as if she believed the special things they’d so enjoyed together should not be enjoyed apart.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“A woman can resolve that, whatever happens, she will not speak till she can do it in a calm and gentle manner, she recited to herself as she waited for the flare of temper to ebb. Perfect silence is a safe resort, when such control cannot be attained.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“noticed, it seemed as if the wagon had expanded overnight. She paused to”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Ever after she lived alongside the knowledge that nothing on this earth could protect her completely.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“How much of what they loved in her was real, and how much was fashioned from what they envisioned her to be?”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“There ought to have been layer cakes, and cookies, and squiggles of boiled sugar candy, Caroline thought as she sat vigil by the bake oven. Swedish crackers, vinegar pie, dried apple pie. The cabin should be heady with brown sugar and clove, and the rich velvety scent of beans and salt pork lazily bubbling in molasses. At the very least, a dried blackberry pie.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“But gracious, it was beautiful, that glass. Clear and cool and smooth, and ever so faintly blue, like ice. Caroline lifted the top pane to the firelight, and the edges seemed to glow. She put a hand to her chest, to keep from floating away. Four panes for the east, four for the west. He had bought her sunlight and moonlight, sunrises and sunsets. She would be able to see clear to the creek road and the bluffs beyond, all winter long. Come spring she could look out at her kitchen garden and see Charles working the fields of sod potatoes and corn.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Just as she placed herself daily between the children and the hazards of the house and yard, Charles stood between all of them and everything beyond the bounds of their claim.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“She had kept her sadness so carefully lidded these last two days that it had thickened into a stock so rich she could smell the salt before she tasted it. Caroline’s throat narrowed so she could scarcely draw breath. Only a long thin note, too high to hear, seeped steadily through to warm the roof of her mouth.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“she were going to let her vexation flare outward, she would have done better to put her foot down with Charles than singe the girls. Then at least it would have served some purpose. Nor could she simply swallow her ire and leave the child beneath her apron to pickle in such brine. She had charge over their moods, and she would not squander it.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited