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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

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.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Believe Boys Couple
Regardless of the popular literary trend of the times, write the thing which lies close to your heart.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Heart Lying Writing
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
Sometime in their lives, everybody wanted to go home.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

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

Humble Keep Small Towns
In 1846 the prairie town of Oak River existed only in a settler’s dream.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Book Dream Rivers
A great many good-natured folks contend that incarceration for a couple of years would prove the best way to dispose of them.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Couple Dispose Great Incarceration
Katherine it was who took upon herself the complete charge of [Junior’s] speech. Not an insignificant “have went” nor an infinitesimal
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Home Mother Running
Love is the light that you see by.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Light Love See
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
When I was young I had no means or time, and now I have the means and time, I have no youth.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Irony Mean Youth
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

Age Emotion Long Tears
thoughts are acrobats, agile and quite often untrustworthy.
BESS STREETER ALDRICH

Acrobats Quite Untrustworthy