Haley

“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

“You've seed how things goes in the world o' men. You've knowed men to be low-down and mean. You've seed ol' Death at his tricks...Ever' man wants life to be a fine thing, and a easy. 'Tis fine, boy, powerful fine, but 'tain't easy. Life knocks a man down and he gits up and it knocks him down agin. I've been uneasy all my life...I've wanted life to be easy for you. Easier'n 'twas for me. A man's heart aches, seein' his young uns face the world. Knowin' they got to get their guts tore out, the way his was tore. I wanted to spare you, long as I could. I wanted you to frolic with your yearlin'. I knowed the lonesomeness he eased for you. But ever' man's lonesome. What's he to do then? What's he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.

—Penny Baxter”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

“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

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