“You wouldn’t think that sorrow could be a light, would you, dearie? But it can. And then after that, service lights it. Yes. . . . I think that is what love is to a woman . . . a lantern in her hand.”

Love is the light that you see by.

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

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.

Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart…filled it, too, with melody that would last forever.

Except for our higher order of minds we are like the little moles under the earth carrying out blindly the work of digging, thinking our own dark passage-ways constitute all there is to the world.

Biggest affirmative argument I know in favor of ‘If a man die, shall he live again?’ is just the way you feel inside you that nothin’ can stop you from livin’ on.

I think that love is more like a light that you carry. At first childish happiness keeps it lighted and after that romance. Then motherhood lights it and then duty . . . and maybe after that sorrow.

A person may encircle the globe with mind open only to bodily comfort. Another may live his life on a sixty-foot lot and listen to the voices of the universe.

Our souls may all be equal in the sight of the Lord, but our gumption and ingenuity ain’t. So the results of man’s labor will never be equal.

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

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

Some girls are apparently born with dates; some through much personal activity, achieve them; but others seem by necessity to have dates thrust upon them.

It takes a small town to keep you humble.

The greatest antidote in the world for grief is work, and the necessity of work.

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.

When I was young I had no means or time, and now I have the means and time, I have no youth.

A lot of people cry and complain and put their hand out and beg. It never goes well.

I came from a real tough neighborhood. I put my hand in some cement and felt another hand.

Benefits ought to be handed ought drop by drop, so that they may be relished the more.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

I love having my hands in the dirt. It is never a science and always an art.

I think that they go hand in hand – notoriety and people lookin at ya. If they look at ya, either you look like a million dollars, or you don’t.

Faith is two empty hands held open to receive all of the Lord

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.