Rose Wilder Lane Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

Writing fiction is … an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

Rose Wilder Lane
Making the best of things is … a damn poor way of dealing with them.... My whole life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand.

Rose Wilder Lane
We joined long wagon trains moving south; we met hundreds of wagons going north; the roads east and west were crawling lines of families traveling under canvas, looking for work, for another foothold somewhere on the land.... The country was ruined, the whole world was ruined; nothing like this had ever happened before. There was no hope, but everyone felt the courage of despair.

Rose Wilder Lane
One thing I hate about the New Deal is that it is killing what, to me, is the American pioneering spirit. I simply do not know what to tell my own boys, leaving school and confronting this new world whose ideal is Security and whose practice is dependence upon government instead of upon one's self.... All the old character-values seem simply insane from a practical point of view; the self-reliant, the independent, the courageous man is penalized from every direction.

Rose Wilder Lane
It was not seen that woman's place was in the home until she began to go out of it; the statement was a reply to an unspoken challenge, it was attempted resistance to irresistible change.

Rose Wilder Lane
My mother cannot learn to have any reliance upon my financial judgment or promises. It's partly, I suppose, because she still thinks of me as a child... She even hesitates to let me have the responsibility of bringing up butter from the spring(house), for fear I won't do it quite right!... This unaccountable daughter who roams the world, borrowing money here and getting shot at there... is a pride, in a way, but a ceaseless apprehension, too.

Rose Wilder Lane
The words we use are the most clumsy symbols for meanings, and to suppose that such words as "war," "glory," "justice," "liberty, home," mean the same in two languages, is an error.

Rose Wilder Lane
When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it. This means that it can not permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines. -pg32.

Rose Wilder Lane
It was like being quite alone on the roof of the world. I felt that if I were to go to the edge and look over … I would see below all that I had ever known; all the crowded cities and seas covered with ships, and the clamor of harbors and traffic of rivers, and farmlands being worked, and herds of cattle driven in dust across interminable plains. All the clamor and clatter, confusion of voices, tumults, and conflicts, must still be going on, down there—over the edge, and below—but here there was only the sky, and a stillness made audible by the brittle grass. Emptiness was so perfect all around me that I felt a part of it, empty myself.

Rose Wilder Lane
I'm not "filled with my art". I ain't got no art. I've got only a kind of craftsman's skill, and make stories as I make biscuits or embroider underwear or wrap up packages.

Rose Wilder Lane
Two deep human desires were at war … the longing for stability, for form, for permanence, which in its essence is the desire for death, and the opposing hunger for movement, change, instability and risk, which are life. Men came from the east and built these American towns because they wished to go no farther, and the towns they built were shaped by the urge to go onward.

Rose Wilder Lane
Freedom is the nature of man; every person is self-controlling and himself responsible for his thoughts, his speech, his acts.

Rose Wilder Lane
I can imagine nothing more wonderful than always wanting to keep a man... It's this NOT wanting to keep them, and yet not quite being able to disentangle one's self, never quite having the ruthlessness to stike at the hands on the gunwale with an oar until they let go — that's the horrible thing.

Rose Wilder Lane
And I say again, you need not worry any more about money. If I were to drop dead this instant, I have enough to double your present income if you never touched a cent of the principle. If you take a notion to do something that costs more than your income warrants, you need only let me know. You can have it.

Rose Wilder Lane
That way of life against which my generation rebelled had given us grim courage, fortitude, self-discipline, a sense of individual responsibility, and a capacity for relentless hard work.

Rose Wilder Lane
To believe that any action based on an ignorance of fact can possibly succeed, is to abandon the use of reason.

Rose Wilder Lane
We are never aware of the present; each instant of living becomes perceptible only when it is past, so that in a sense we do not live at all, but only remember living.

Rose Wilder Lane
The difference between mining and geology is like that between the old-time bear-hunters and the city man.

Rose Wilder Lane
There is a city myth that country life was isolated and lonely; the truth is that farmers and their families then had a richer social life than they have now. They enjoyed a society organic, satisfying and whole, not mixed and thinned with the life of town, city and nation as it now is.

Rose Wilder Lane
Men are alive on this earth, only because the imperative human desire is to attack the enemies of human life. -viii.

Rose Wilder Lane
No jailer can compel any prisoner to speak or act against that prisoner's will, but chains can prevent his acting, and a gag can prevent his speaking.

Rose Wilder Lane
I want to finish work on my mother's juvenile (Farmer Boy manuscript) by the end of June. There's a curious half-angry reluctance in my writing for other people. I say to myself that whatever earnings there may be are all in the family. Also I seize upon this task as an excuse to postpone my own work.

Rose Wilder Lane
I am a contributing creator of American civilization; it does not create me. I control the stem of this civilization that is within my reach; it does not control me. It can not even make me read Spengler, if I'd rather read a pulp magazine. -pg18.

Rose Wilder Lane
I so much like real things - the realities that come naturally from the depths of us like - what shall I say? - the way trees grow, from some inner essential principle of them, just expressing itself.

Rose Wilder Lane
The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and risks of self-reliance.

Rose Wilder Lane
Our quilts were more than useful, they had the faint sentimentality of a pressed flower. And no more beauty. We did not value them for their appearance, but for the memories in them, for their good wearing qualities and the thrift they represented.

Rose Wilder Lane
I am too sick to work and haven't money enough to last 2 months and pay income tax. I want to keep going but do not see quite how, and there is no alternative - rather than justify my mother's 25-year dread of my "coming back on her, sick", I must kill myself. If she has to pay funeral costs, at least she will cut them to the bone and I will not be here to endure her martyrdom and prolong it by living.

Rose Wilder Lane
In our ignorance, we could not see that the Kaiser's Germany and the Communist International were merely two aspects of the Old World's reaction against the new, the American principle of individual liberty and human rights.

Rose Wilder Lane
The first twenty years of my life were wasted... I didn't fit my environment, and I didn't know any other.

Rose Wilder Lane
Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special Sunday quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater propriety and stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothes.

Rose Wilder Lane