Quotes from Laura Ingalls Wilder

Everything from the little house was in the wagon, except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not need to take these, because Pa could always make new ones.

The path that went by the little house had become a road. Almost every day Laura and Mary stopped their playing and stared in surprise at a wagon slowly creaking by on that road.

The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.

There is nothing wrong with God's plan that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.

The world seems a lonesome place when mother has passed away and only memories of her are left.

Home is the nicest word there is.

If the members of a home are ill-temperered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house. You may not know just what is wrong, but you wish to make your visit short.

I always have been a busy person, doing my own housework, helping the Man of the Place when help could not be obtained; but I love to work. And it is a pleasure to write. And, oh, I do just love to play!

The real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.

She heard pa shouting,Jiminy crickets!It's raining fish-hooks and hammer handles!

If only I had some grease I could fix some kind of a light, Ma considered. We didn't lack for light when I was a girl before this newfangled kerosene was ever heard of. That's so, said Pa. These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraph and kerosene and coal stoves--they're good things to have, but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.

A farmer depends on himself, and the land and the weather. If you're a farmer, you raise what you eat, you raise what you wear, and you keep warm with wood out of your own timber. You work hard, but you work as you please, and no man can tell you to go or come. You'll be free and independent, son, on a farm.

These happy golden years are passing by, these happy golden years.

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.

No rich man can walk through the eye of a needle.

It can't beat us! Pa said. Can't it, Pa? Laura asked stupidly. No, said Pa. It's got to quit sometime and we don't. It can't lick us. We won't give up. Then 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.

Ma sighed gently and said, A whole year gone, Charles. But Pa answered, cheerfully: What's a year amount to? We have all the time there is.

It was so wonderful to be there, safe at home, sheltered from the winds and the cold. Laura thought that this must be a little like heaven, where the weary are at rest.

They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

The fact is that while there has been a good deal of discussion for and against women in business, farm women have always been business women, and I have never heard a protest.

Every war is more or less a woman's war.

A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin

Everything from the little house was in the wagon except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not need to take these, because Pa could always make new ones.

Our inability to see things that are right before our eyes, until they are pointed out to us, would be amusing if it were not at times so serious. We are coming, I think, to depend too much on being told and shown and taught, instead of using our own eyes and brains and inventive faculties, which are likely to be just as good as any other person's.