40 Quotes by Caroline Fraser

The salt water tingled my feet and made them feel so good all the rest of the day, and just to think, the same water that bathes the shores of China and Japan came clear across the ocean and bathed my feet.

I realize with regret that my report is not as complete as it should be,” she wrote, “and had fully intended to do better, but we are told that good intentions make excellent paving stones.

Voters would long remember the obscene spectacle of Grover Cleveland and his lack of charity in a time of need. No Democrat would be elected president for the next sixteen years; Republicans would hold majorities in Congress for a solid three decades. Not until 1932 would a member of the Democratic party emerge with a different conception of the federal government and what it might do for the American people.

When the governor announced his “day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer to deliver the people from the locusts and to comfort those afflicted,” thousands were already fasting, whether they liked it or not.

Nothing is certain, but if nothing is certain, how can we be certain that nothing is certain?

It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures and to be cheerful and have courage when things go wrong.

She was never overcome by drabness or squalor. She never glamorized anything; yet she saw the loveliness in everything.

Scientists estimate that it took a thousand years for an inch of topsoil to accumulate on the arid high plains. It was the work of a moment to blow it away. Topsoil exposed by the disc plows turned to dust, and the dust began to eddy, roil, and lift on the wind. “Rolling dusters,” they were called, or “black blizzards.” There were fourteen of them in 1932. The year after that, thirty-eight.

Wilder’s “truth” was less a matter of fact than of her memories, feelings, and convictions. Her work was based on facts but not factual. It was historical fiction, not history. Its chronology, and certain incidents and characters, were invented, altered, and fictionalized.