Nancy E. Turner > Quotes

“The best thing a girl can be is a good wife and mother. It is a girl's highest calling. I hope I am ready.”
― Nancy E. Turner

“I might like to have someone courting me. But it would have to be someone who is a square shooter and who has a train load of courage. And it would have to be someone who doesn't have to talk down to folks to feel good, or to tell a person they are worthless ifthey just made a mistake. And he'd have to be not too thin. Why, I remember hugging [my brother] Ernest was like warpping your arms around a fence post,and I love Ernest, but I want a man who can hold me down in a wind. Maybe he'd have to be pretty stubborn. I don't have any use for a man that isn't stubborn. Likely a stubborn fellow will stay with you through thick and thin, and a spineless one will take off, or let his heart wander.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

“Children are a burden to a mother, but not the way a heavy box is to a mule. Our children weight hard on my heart, and thinking about them growing up honest and healthy, or just living to grow up at all, makes a load in my chest that is bigger than the safe at the bank,and more valuable to me than all the gold inside it.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

“We are a noisy and blessed little family”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

“Sometimes I feel like a tree on a hill, at the place where all the wind blows and the hail hits the tree the hardest. All the people I love are down the side aways, sheltered under a great rock, and I am out of the fold, standing alone in the sun and the snow. I feel like I am not part of the rest somehow, although they welcome me and are kind. I see my family as they sit together and it is like theyh ave a certain way between them that is beyond me. I wonder if other folks ever feel included yet alone.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

“A nice girl should never go anywhere without a loaded gun and a big knife." ~ Sarah Agnes Prine”
― Nancy E. Turner

“I have a deep-down belief that there are folks in the world who are good through and through, and others who came in mean and will go out mean. It's like coffee. Once it's roasted, it all looks brown. Until you pour hot water on it and see what comes out. Folks get into hot water, you see what comes out.”
― Nancy E. Turner, Sarah's Quilt

“Mama told me to make a special point to remember the best times of my life. There are so many hard things to live through, and latching on to the good things will give you strength to endure, she says. So I must remember this day. It is beautiful and this seems like the best time to live and the best place”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

“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.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

“[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.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

“Taking up marriage is a good excuse for taking up cursing, I think.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

“That man makes me feel like I have my bonnet on backwards.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

“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.”
― Nancy E. Turner, Sarah's Quilt

“I have named the star Jack's Star. It is beautiful and bright and gives me joy when it is here and pain when it is not, and every year as Summer approaches I have seen it coming over the hills. I used to think that someday i will learn what educated people have called it and why it is only here sometimes, but now i think it wouldn't matter. It is Jack's Star, and they only have to ask and I will tell them it's name. They will have to ask the star itself where it goes and why it is not content to stay.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

“How fragile our lives are anyway. How quickly things can change forever.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

“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.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

“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.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

“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.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

“It seems there is always a road with bends and forks to choose, and taking one path means you can never take another one. There's no starting over nor undoing the steps I've taken. It isn't like I'd want to not have my little ones and Jack and that ranch, it is part of life to have to support yourself. It's just that I want everything, my insides are not just hungry, but greedy. I want to find out all the things in the world and still have a family and a ranch. Maybe part of passing that test was a marker for where I've been, but it feels more like a pointer for something I'll never reach. (November 29, 1887 entry, pg 309)”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

“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.”
― Nancy E. Turner, Sarah's Quilt

“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.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

“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)”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

“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.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

“Getting out of bed is a good way to leave your troubles behind.”
― Nancy E. Turner, Sarah's Quilt

“Blue Horse said to me... wisdom is not a path, it is a tree.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

“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.”
― Nancy E. Turner

“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.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901

“I said, Well, looks like he's pretty ornery. I wonder where he gets it?

"Jack just shrugged and kissed my cheek, and then whispered in my ear, He gets it from his mother.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

“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.”
― Nancy E. Turner, These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

“Was he he handsome?" she asked with a sly smirk.
"Very. He is still, I think."
"The devil, they say, goes about in finery."
"And if you believe Beelzebub is as cunning as he is attractive, then I think we have found him.”
― Nancy E. Turner