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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.

Bess Streeter Aldrich

It takes a small town to keep you humble.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Humble Keep Small Towns
Sometime in their lives, everybody wanted to go home.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Home Sometimes Wanted
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.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Feet Mind Voice
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.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Love Motherhood Thinking
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.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Christmas Song Xmas
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.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Dark Order Thinking
There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Division Heart Mother
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.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Hand Love Sorrow Woman
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.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Favors Living Men Way
Love is the light that you see by.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Light Love See
Things last so much longer than people.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Lasts Longer People
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.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Dream Garden Mind
not all clever words are true. … And inversely most things that are true are not clever.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Clever Cleverness Inversely
The greatest antidote in the world for grief is work, and the necessity of work.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Antidote Grief World
In 1846 the prairie town of Oak River existed only in a settler’s dream.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Book Dream Rivers
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.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Equality Labor Men Sight