There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication.

They are the most painful tears in the world ... the tears of the aged ... for they come from dried beds where the emotions have long burned low.

Junior was eleven. The statement is significant. There are a few peevish people in the world who believe that all eleven-year-old boys ought to be hung. Others, less irritable, think that gently chloroforming them would seem more humane. A great many good-natured folks contend that incarceration for a couple of years would prove the best way to dispose of them.

Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.

You have to dream things out. It keeps a kind of an ideal before you. You see it first in your mind and then you set about to try and make it like the ideal. If you want a garden,-why, I guess you've got to dream a garden.

In 1846 the prairie town of Oak River existed only in a settler's dream.

It was true, she thought, that the big things awe us but the little things touch us.