Quotes from Caroline Fraser

I was afraid to admit feeling ill because even when I was 4 or 5, I knew that my father viewed sickness as a sign of weakness, of sin, of disobedience.

Christian Scientists not only don't like to acknowledge illness; they don't like to see it. On occasion, I was sent to my room from the dinner table for sneezing or coughing; I now know that I was allergic to our cat.

My father was a particularly zealous Christian Scientist, but young Christian Science children, who have little choice but to believe what their parents are telling them, are taught that illness originates in errors in their parents' and, eventually, their own thinking.

As a teenager, I had been growing away from the beliefs of the church, but one of the main things that caused me to question Christian Science was that the year that I left home to go to college, a boy who I knew in my Sunday School, whose name was Michael Schram, who was 12 years old, died at home of a ruptured appendix.

Christian Science is often inherited, and like many inheritances, it comes with family secrets. The religion encourages secrecy. Members of the Church tend to hide their illnesses from one another, even within families. My father has never once, in my presence, admitted to feeling ill.

Between the fictional Laura of the books and the even more heavily fictionalized girl of the TV show, we've tended to lose sight of the fact that Laura Ingalls Wilder was a real person who was complicated and intense.

Christian Science has been enormously influential in our religious history, and the church is very powerful. It has won an extraordinary number of legal battles in this country. It has succeeded in passing a number of what are called 'religious exemption laws.'

Americans are squeamish about anything that seems to punish people for their religious beliefs.

Fortunately, most religious people accept medicine as a gift from God and reap the benefits of both realms.

Christian Science has always appealed to the middle-classes and the upper middle classes. In part, this is because it requires a certain amount of education to study 'Science and Health' to the degree that Christian scientists do. It's not an easy book to read! It's 700 pages, and it's written in a nineteenth-century manner and diction.

She was never overcome by drabness or squalor. She never glamorized anything; yet she saw the loveliness in everything.

His most remarkable gift, as Laura saw it, was a deep and profound contentment with what he had.

In life, loss was the engine that set Wilder's fiction in motion. Exile propelled the powerful emotional current of the Little House books, an intensely felt nostalgia for people and places lost to her. That emotion was absent in "Free Land," relegating it to homesteading soap opera. Its loosely linked anecdotes were joined not by familial love but by Lane's, and the Post 's, ideology.

Rose once jotted down a quotation she attributed to her mother: "I don't know which is more heartbreaking, a dream un[ful]filled or a dream realized.

Houses are real, deep, emotional things.

The Plains, Willa Cather wrote years later, are "the happiness and the curse of my life."104

Nothing is certain, but if nothing is certain, how can we be certain that nothing is certain?

Wilder's "truth" was less a matter of fact than of her memories, feelings, and convictions. Her work was based on facts but not factual. It was historical fiction, not history. Its chronology, and certain incidents and characters, were invented, altered, and fictionalized.

A story too many times told is a dish with-out salt. ---Rose Wilder Lane

But the 1890s may also count as the first time in human history when market manipulation during a climate crisis crashed the world economy.

Everything is evened up in the world. The rich have their ice in the summer but the poor get theirs in the winter.

By 1867, there were only fifty Dakota left in Minnesota.67 That year, a baby girl was born just across the Mississippi, in a little house in the Big Woods.

Voters would long remember the obscene spectacle of Grover Cleveland and his lack of charity in a time of need. No Democrat would be elected president for the next sixteen years; Republicans would hold majorities in Congress for a solid three decades. Not until 1932 would a member of the Democratic party emerge with a different conception of the federal government and what it might do for the American people.

Across every inhabited continent, just as on the Great Plains, mass land clearing and wheat farming had led to significant drying, exhausting the soils and throwing fragile ecosystems out of whack. Combined with the market forces controlling distribution, human-caused climate change joined with natural weather patterns to wreak absolute havoc.