Quotes from Nancy E. Turner

My life feels like a book left out on the porch, and the wind blows the pages faster and faster, turning always toward a new chapter faster than I can stop to read it.

Taking up marriage is a good excuse for taking up cursing, I think.

Children] just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them, as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives.

Living is getting knocked down time and again, then standing up time and again, and once more. It's easy to act honorable when things are coming along and all your pastures are green. Plenty difficult when the ground is dried and burned and people have connived to take even that from you. I'll sell this place, or I'll lose it. I'll go on. People who don't have hard times aren't living.

That man makes me feel like I have my bonnet on backwards.

I wish the Lord would just knock me over with kindness and goodness and simple purity, because I don't seem to be getting the knack of it on my own.

And he likes to torment me, and laughs when I get upset when he does. No, of course not. I do not love Jack Elliot. He is low and coarse and a soldier, and not the kind of man I want to spend my life with.

How fragile our lives are anyway. How quickly things can change forever.

Mama said it's probably because of Suzanne, and that you are never the same after a child dies. That made me wonder what she was like before Clover died, because I don't think I really knew my own mother until I had children, and if she was different before, I don't remember.

I used to complain to myself that life was so boring, that there was too much laundry to do, too many noses to wipe. Now there are not enough noses to wipe.

What a pure blessing it was to have a bath in a tub alone in a room where all you had to do was pump the water, not tote buckets. Then all you had to do was pull out the cork, not tote more buckets to the back porch--that kind of thing is easy to take lightly until you don't have it.

I must think about something else for a while. But then I remember his warn arms and his big strong legs touching mine and how hard and wide his chest was and how hot his kiss was, and I got outside and feed the chickens. They are getting mighty fat.

Blue Horse said to me... wisdom is not a path, it is a tree.

Getting out of bed is a good way to leave your troubles behind.

I am not sorry, but this has hurt my heart and spirit more than all the other trials, for being forsaken is worse than being killed. (Sept 5, 1881)

I have been sad almost a whole year, thinking that taking that test was somehow the end of my learning and that not having that as a possibility in my future left a big empty spot in my life that the children and the ranch didn't fill. But my life is not like that, it is a tree, and I can stay in one place and spread out in all directions, and I can do more learning shading this brood of mine than if I was all alone.

I declare, it is like some other part of me made up some rules about happiness and I just went along with them without thinking. My heart is lightened so much that I am amazed at how sad I felt for so long.

It seems as if I can only thing if I write my journal, it just connects the part of my head that is busy doing things with the part that is busy thinking about everything else. I know all these pepole are so busy because they love each other and me. We are a noisy crowd of love

Why should being quiet mean you're in love? Because, she said. That means you aren't nervous with each other, or affected, or likely to be hiding intentions behind too much conversation. A friendly silence can speak between two who will walk together a long way, she said.

Well, there is rough old Albert, as ornery as any big brother a girl could have, putting his arm around Savannah and cooing to her like a repenting hound dog, and promising her she is not common nor shameful. I watched all this and thought you just never know sometimes what's in a man's heart. When you think he is all tough nails and boards he can be different on the inside. It makes me wonder about other men I know, too.