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.

Many a good beginning makes a bad ending.

We heap up around us things that we do not need as the crow makes piles of glittering pebbles.

The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.

Tact does for life just what lubricating oil does for machinery.

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.

The incurable optimism of the farmer who throws his seed on the ground every spring, betting it and his time against the elements, seemed inextricably to blend with the creed of her pioneer forefathers that "it is better farther on"-- only instead of farther on in space, it was farther on in time, over the horizon of the years ahead instead of the far horizon of the west.