“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Things last so much longer than people.

For though love has been ridiculed and disgraced, exchanged and bartered, dragged through the courts, and sold for thirty pieces of silver, the bright, steady glow of its fire still shines on the hearth-stones of countless homes.

not all clever words are true. … And inversely most things that are true are not clever.

Katherine it was who took upon herself the complete charge of [Junior’s] speech. Not an insignificant “have went” nor an infinitesimal

War is to man what motherhood is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace.

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated.

A girl is Innocence playing in the mud, Beauty standing on its head, and Motherhood dragging a doll by the foot.

When children are little, they really need you in one way. When they’re bigger, they need you as a friend.

Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

And balancing motherhood and career makes you both a better mother and a better businesswoman.

Her [Mary’s] motherhood extends beyond view. In the will of the Son, she becomes at once mother and maid: sheltering him, but sheltered in him, forming him, but formed by him …

Motherhood changes everything.