Nancy E. Turner Quotes

Enjoy the top 97 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Nancy E. Turner.

“We attended church Sunday as a family, and it was an even balance as to who was harder to keep still, the four Elliot children or Captain Elliot himself. Jack kept up a stream of secretive winks at me in a most suggestive fashion, which made me blush despite the fact that I desperately tried to maintain my composure. Two year old Suzanne squirmed in my lap but was still for him, so he bounced her quietly on his knee. The boys, true to their deeply spiritual natures, snored softly through the entire sermon, and April sat still but looked out the windows, bored and restlessly shifting in her seat.
(pg 326)”
— Nancy E. Turner —

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

“We are a noisy and blessed little family”

— Nancy E. Turner

“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

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

“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

“Getting out of bed is a good way to leave your troubles behind.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“It seems as if I can only thing if I write my journal, it just connects the part of my head that is busy doing things with the part that is busy thinking about everything else. I know all these pepole are so busy because they love each other and me. We are a noisy crowd of love”

— Nancy E. Turner

“A woman who dreams of a good home with a man who holds for her only a poor love is putting a $50 saddle on a $20 horse. She'd be far better off single than riding with him.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“A clock only turns one direction”

— Nancy E. Turner

“Some people sense is wasted on and that's purely a fact.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“Low down dirty ornery rotten skunk of a cussed mule-headed soldier! What's he want with my book anyway? And what kind of a way is that to write a congratulations? I am so mad I could walk clear to that fort and take him on single handed.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“The best cure for sadness is doing something.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“Well, he perked right up and said, Five hundred dollars? Mrs. Elliot, I believe we can be of service to you after all.
I doubt it, I told him. I made this money with the sweat of my brow and the labor of my hands and I've got the rawhide to prove it. I don't inted to leave it with any man that thinks money is confusing.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“No wonder Mama went away in her head when Clover passed on. And then Papa. I am going to visit my Mama tomorrow and tell her I am sorry for everything I ever did that caused her sorrow or worry, and for ever wishing, during those days, that she would come back. She probably wanted to stay there. It's a wonder she came back at all. If I knew how to make myself go away in my head, I declare I would.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“But Jack, you're just a Captain and I'm the General. I order you not to go.
He tried to smile, ... These orders, he whispered, come from the Commander in Chief.”

— Nancy E. Turner

One thing I know from living with Jack is that war, any war, stains a man deep, and nothing can get the stain out. They can wear clothes like a rancher or a banker, but the stains are under there, never far from the surface of their skin.

— Nancy E. Turner

“Hard work is still peace compared to what can worry a person on the inside.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“It is not a lonely feeling, but just as I am always sad to close the cover on a book, I feel I have finished with this part of my life and will have to begin a new book.”

— Nancy E. Turner

How could I explain to a beautiful lady in a silk dress that when I picked up her baby girl, I felt that lady's long-ago chubby shape in my arms, smelled her sunshine-touched hair? That years and years of tiny memories flitted past my heart like a flock of birds spinning on invisible air? It was the smell of the little girls, slightly wet, somewhat soapy, the smell of porridge supper, and the taste of kissed-away tears. Here in my arms were the best parts of life, going on, blooming like a strong tree.

— Nancy E. Turner

Reckon women don't think like men." "Why on earth don't they learn how?" I rubbed my face. "Ain't meant to, honey." I smiled and kissed his brow. "It occurs to us to ask the same thing. Keeps the world turning, I suspect.

— Nancy E. Turner

“Home at last, and my little ranch house looks mighty plain, but it is home to me and I am glad to see it.”

— Nancy E. Turner

I am very thankful that man took one look at me showing with a baby coming along, with my hair falling down, and the broom lying at a mound of broken glass, and supper boiling over on the stove, April wearing a dirty pinafore screaming for me to hold her, and just then the baby in my arms spit up all over me, and he said, You know ... I'd be kindly obliged if you'd let me have supper some other time.

— Nancy E. Turner

“I asked Mama was it a sin to do what I done, and she said no, it was the same as David slaying Goliath, it was only to save Ulyssa and the others, not because of meanness that I did it. I would do it again, too. 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.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“Our axles don't match but our wheels are turning.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“I dream of land, cut only where streams glistened with birdsong wander through quiet hills burnt hard by the scrape of wind, and of a porch from which a single road leads only homeward.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“Mrs. Faulkner had sidled up to me and said Good day, Mrs. Elliot?
I just looked at her, and I saw in her eyes that she was wanting some kind of approval for her boy because of his career ahead, and she suddenly just looked like an old lady, not fancy and rich and frightening. An old lady whose son admired my husband, and who herself would be as helpless in the Territories as a newborn calf and not nearly as useful. Good day, I said back. It is a funny thing how much more proud people can be of themselves if they never step back and take a good look in a glass.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“I wondered someday if the devil might wake up and see he got the wrong girl, what will happen then?”

— Nancy E. Turner

“But there is no easy way to mourn a child.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“It's not fair, men get to go off and chase around the country and get medals for doing stupid things and women get to sit home and worry.”

— Nancy E. Turner

We move on like stone statues. I feel like my legs are made of wooden branches and my heart is a hard rock inside. For days I do not even tie up my hair and it flows around me like an Indian's. I can't find my bonnet and my traveling clothes are ragged and so is my soul.

— Nancy E. Turner

“It seems to me that any time there are men making a war, somewhere there are women and children at home waiting and worrying.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“We'll I'd like to see the woman that wouldn't defend her kin any way possible, and see what she's made of. Anyone who hasn't got some backbone has no business trying to live in the Territories.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“It is strange to have this little girl who is my own flesh and blood and yet she seems so separate from me.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“A move is a way of lightening your load and starting things new.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“To my room. Sheriff John Moultrie blew through his teeth and pursed lips, making a sound more akin to a steaming teapot than a whistle. The tune was "On the Road to Alabam'," a melody he'd picked up from watching gangs of gandy dancers as a child; he'd forgotten the words, but the ditty remained part of his grain.”

— Nancy E. Turner

“Want to wear scarlet velvet and slippers and lace gloves and ride in a stage instead of wearing calluses on my hands driving a team like a man. It is not her fault. She is right. The Lord looks on the inside, although people look on the outside. That man is measuring cloth”