Laura Ingalls Wilder Quotes

“The last time always seems sad, but it isn't really. The end of one thing is only the beginning of another.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, These Happy Golden Years

“Beyond them the darkness was like a mist thickening over a flat, white world. Stars twinkled far away around part of its rim. Before him, the black storm climbed rapidly up the sky and in silence destroyed the stars.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter

“Mary was too scared to move. Laura was too scared to stand to still.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek

“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.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Such magic there is in Christmas to draw the absent ones home and if unable to go in the body the thoughts will hover there.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“The vast prairie was dark and still. Only the wind moved stealthily through the grass, and the large, low stars hung glittering from the great sky.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie

“Laura thought of Ma's saying, "It takes all kinds of people to make a world.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie

“Wilder wrote, 'The roses scented the wind, and along the road the fresh blossoms, with their new petals and golden centers, looked up like little faces.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

“Ambition is, like other good things[.] a good only when use in moderation. It has worked great good for the world, and great evil also.
[Ale]xander is an example of a man completely carried away by ambition: so much so that when he had conquered the whole world (which one would suppose was enough to satisfy ambition); he wept because there were no more world to conquer.
Ambition is a good servant, but a hard master; and if you think it is likely to become your master: I would say to you in the words of the immortals Shakespeare: 'Cromwell, I charge thee fling away ambition, by that sin fell the angels.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

“Laura Ingalls Wilder said, “Home is the nicest place there is.”
― Kenneth Eade

“When we focus on people and life instead of material possessions and mere wants, there's not much room for emotional hand-wringing. Instead, there's more space to weigh what we value in our lives and to acknowledge what really counts. Chapter 9 Simplicity Laura Ingalls in The Long Winter”
― Erin Blakemore, The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

“In an era when letter writing is a diminished art, we have an opportunity to share this historical and literary treasure trove in The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder. This book is both a reminder of a bygone era of genuine communication and another visit with Laura Ingalls Wilder, pioneer and author.”
― William Anderson, The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“The fact that Nellie wasn't any one person but rather a composite of three of the real Laura's antagonists' worst traits makes her even more terrifying, some kind of blond Frankenstein assembled from assorted bitch parts.”
― Wendy McClure, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie

“I think we receive a great deal what we expect in this world.
-Laura Ingalls Wilder”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“She realized that all her life the teachings of those early days have influenced me and the example set by father and mother has been something I have tried to follow, which failures here and there, with rebellion at times, but always coming back to it as the compass needle to the star,
-Laura Ingalls Wilder, 'As A Farm Woman Thinks.' Missouri Ruralist, August 1, 1923; Farm Journalist, p. 290.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Under the whole sky there was nothing but the white land, the snow blowing, and the wind and the cold.

He was not afraid. He knew where the town was and as long as the sun was in the sky or the moon or the stars he could not be lost. But he had a feeling colder than the wind. He felt that he was the only life on the cold earth under the cold sky; he and his horse alone in an enormous coldness.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter

“For some reason, there was a scare about the Catholics getting control of the government and the awful things they would do to protestants. The daughter would wring her hands and pace the floor declaring that the Catholics should never take her Bible away from her. Then a comet appeared in the sky and both women thought it meant the end of the world and were more frightened than ever. But I couldn’t see how I could be afraid of both comet and Catholics at the same time so I worried about neither.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

“Clara Webber commented on the bond that "Wilder people" forge: " I always instantly like any admirer of the Little House books!”
― William Anderson, The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“The Wilders, of course, paid no attention to her exuberance, continuing to live a frugal existence among their pigs and hens, entertained by a self-re-newing circle of farm cats and their preternaturally gifted Airedale terrier, Nero, who would sit politely at the dinner table like a member of the family, eating off his own plate.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“We were just two wild Indians... on our own and no though of its being wrong. You must not have us treated like children of today. It would spoil the i picture and the interest..' Children back then, she wrote, 'weren't raised to be helpless cowards.'
-Laura Ingalls Wilder”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Jane decides that she'll stay silent until Rose talks, but after ninety seconds of chewing her tuna, she can't handle it and she starts to tell Rose how she started reading the Little House books to Lauren, how Lauren has become obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder and the idea of being a pioneer, how she talks about eating fried pig's tails and maple syrup snow. Rose sips her iced tea but doesn't respond and so Jane tells her about the new flowers she's planning to plant in her garden in the spring. A plant that smells like lemon when the leaves rustle. Another that grows flowers that look like candy corn!”
― Jennifer Close, Marrying the Ketchups

“Howard Ensign had joined the Congregational church after their revival and would testify at prayer meeting every Wednesday night. It seemed to me that the things between one and God should be between him and God like loving ones mother. One didn't go around saying, 'I love my mother, she has been so good to me.' One just loved her and did things that she liked one to do.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography

“I think there are always compensations. The trouble is we do not recognize them. We usually are so busily longing for things we can't have that we overlook what we have in their place, that is even more worth while. Sometimes we realize our happiness only by comparison after we have lost it. It really appears to be true that,
To appreciate Heaven well
A man must have some 15 minutes of Hell.

Laura Ingalls Wilder; The Farm Home (13) , November 20, 1919”
― Stephen W. Hines, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist: Writings from the Ozarks