The sweetness of life lies in usefulness, like honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.
It does not so much matter what happens. It is what one does when it happens that really counts.
She thought to herself, “This is now.” She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
Mary and Carrie and baby Grace and Ma had all had scarlet fever. The Nelsons across the creek had had it too, so there had been no one to help Pa and Laura.
Pa did not like a country so old and worn out that the hunting was poor. He wanted to go west. For two years he had wanted to go west and take a homestead, but Ma did not want to leave the settled country.
Every job is good if you do your best and work hard. A man who works hard stinks only to the ones that have nothing to do but smell.
So Pa sold the little house. He sold the cow and calf. He made hickory bows and fastened them upright to the wagon box. Ma helped him stretch white canvas over them.
Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary’s eyes, and Mary was blind.
But in the east the sky was pale and through the gray woods came lanterns with wagons and horses, bringing Grandpa and Grandma and aunts and uncles and cousins.
A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.
The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.
There the wild animals wandered and fed as though they were in a pasture that stretched much farther than a man could see, and there were no settlers. Only Indians lived there.
There is nothing wrong with God’s plan that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.
We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.
We’d never get anything fixed to suit us if we waited for things to suit us before we started.
No rich man can walk through the eye of a needle.
Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small, but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds could make it flicker because it would not give up.
They drove a long way through the snowy woods, till they came to the town of Pepin. Mary and Laura had seen it once before, but it looked different now.
Money hasn’t any value of its own; it represents the stored up energy of men and women and is really just someone’s promise to pay a certain amount of that energy.
That which is the wonder of one age is the commonplace of the next.