Haley

“She thought of her younger days,—the gleam which seemed always ahead,—of the vague allure which accomplishing something in the arts had always held for her. And now she was nearly fifty and she was not to know the fruition of any of those hopes.

"Oh Will, I am so disappointed," she said to that invisible comrade who was only spirit and memory. "I can only feel those things,—not do them."

Isn't motherhood, itself, an accomplishment?

She knew that she made her own answer, and yet it gave her a sense of satisfaction and peace. Will might said it. It sounded like him.

"But I've made so many mistakes.... Will.... even in that."

You are a good mother, Abbie-girl."

Yes, it gave her a sense of peace and comfort.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A Lantern in Her Hand

“Penny's bowels yearned over his son. He gave him something more that his paternity. He found that the child stood wide-eyed and breathless before the miracle of bird and creature, of flower and tree, of wind and rain and sun and moon, as he had always stood. And if, on a soft day in April, the boy had prowled away on his boy's business, he could understand the thing that had drawn him. He understood, too, its briefness.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“Home was something besides so much lumber and plaster. You built your thoughts into the frame work. You planted a little of your heart with the trees and the shrubbery.”
― Bess Streeter Aldrich, A Lantern in Her Hand

“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia