Oh, Charles!” Ma said. “What will we do?” Pa slumped down on a bench and said, “I don’t know.
Haste makes waste, but a lazy man’d rather get his work done fast than do it himself... all it saves is time, son. And what good is time, with nothing to do? You want to sit and twiddle your thumbs, all these stormy winter days?
He called back, softly, “Come out here, Caroline, and look at the moon.
She liked the enormous sky and the winds, and the land that you couldn’t see to the end of. Everything was so free and big and splendid.
We crossed the James River and in 20 minutes we reached the top of the bluffs on the other side. We all stopped and looked back at the scene and I wished for an artist’s hand or a poet’s brain or for even to be able to tell in good plain prose how beautiful it was. If I had been the Indians I wold have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left it.
It beats me,” he said, “why they call a south wind a norther, and how a wind from the south can be so tarnation cold. I never saw anything like it. Down here in this country, the north end of a south wind is the coldest wind I ever heard of.
Almanzo! What’s the matter? Be you sick? It’s five o’clock!
For just one little minute she almost wished that Pa was a railroad man. There was nothing so wonderful as railroads, and railroad men were great men, able to drive the big iron engines and the fast, dangerous trains. But of course not even railroad men were bigger or better than Pa, and she did not really want him to be anything but what he was.
Flags were everywhere, and in the Square the band was playing “Yankee Doodle.” The fifes tooted and the flutes shrilled and the drums came in with rub-a-dub-dub. Yankee Doodle went to town, Riding on a pony, He stuck a feather in his hat And called it macaroni!
At first the splashes of cream showed thick and smooth around the little hole.
Beyond them the darkness was like a mist thickening over a flat, white world. Stars twinkled far away around part of its rim. Before him, the black storm climbed rapidly up the sky and in silence destroyed the stars.
The vast prairie was dark and still. Only the wind moved stealthily through the grass, and the large, low stars hung glittering from the great sky.
Laura thought of Ma’s saying, “It takes all kinds of people to make a world.
Grace sat up, too frightened to make a sound, and even Laura was horrified, for the stool lay in two pieces. Then Pa laughed. “Never mind, Grace,” he said. “You only unscrewed it all the way. But,” he said sternly, “you stay off this stool, after this.
Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.
The last time always seems sad, but it isn’t really. The end of one thing is only the beginning of another.
If wisdom’s ways you wisely seek, five things observe with care: to whom you speak, of whom you speak, and how and when and where. Your loving mother, C. L. Ingalls.
Almanzo could only look longingly at the eager three-year-olds. He just touched their velvety noses, and then he went quickly away from them, and put on his barn frock over his good school-clothes.
I love to work. And it is a pleasure to write. And, oh, I do just love to play!
56. They all flew away into the west. At this point in the novel Pa delivers this haunting line, ‘I would like some one to tell me how they all knew at once that it was time to go, and how they knew which way was west and their ancestral home.” Prof. Lockwood commented, ‘Locusts were then – and still are – mysterious creatures, whose sudden, irruptions are their defining attribute.
Wilder wrote, ‘The roses scented the wind, and along the road the fresh blossoms, with their new petals and golden centers, looked up like little faces.