William H. Armstrong Quotes

“Night loneliness was always bad when the younger children had gone to bed, or when the father was not in the cabin. ‘Night loneliness is part fearing,’ the boy’s mother had once said to him.”

“The boy was crying now. Not that there was any new or sudden sorrow. There just seemed to be nothing else to fill up the vast lostness of the moment.”

“Sounder might come home again. But you must learn to lose, child. The Lord teaches the old to lose. The young don’t know how to learn it. Some people is born to keep. Some is born to lose. We was born to lose, I reckon….”

“The boy did not remember his age. He knew he had lived a long, long time.”

“When life is so tiresome, there ain’t no peace like the greatest peace—the peace of the Lord’s hand holding you.”

“Having both school and Sounder would be mighty good, but if he couldn’t have school, he could always have Sounder.”

“Perhaps she too felt the loneliness that came with the wind as it passed the cabin outside, and the closeness of the world whose farthest border in the night was the place where the lamp light ended, at the edge of the cabin walls.”

“His mother always hummed when she was worried. When she held a well child on her lap and rocked back and forth, she sang. But when she held a sick child close in her arms and the rocker moved just enough to squeak a little, she would hum.”

“The boy dreamed of the stalk land covered by the Lords mighty flood. ‘Cabins built on posts would just float like boats, perch and all,’ he assured himself in a whisper. If they floated from the far ends of the land and all came together, that would be a town, and he wouldn’t be lonely anymore...”

“The boy felt warm and proud inside when he saw his father’s great hand take hold of the handle of the hot lid without using a pot rag the way his mother always did.”