Top 60 Nancy E. Turner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “How fragile our lives are anyway. How quickly things can change forever.”

— Nancy E. Turner

2. “We are a noisy and blessed little family.”

— Nancy E. Turner

3. “Every season has its beauty.”

— Nancy E. Turner

4. “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

5. “Blue Horse said to me... wisdom is not a path, it is a tree.”

— Nancy E. Turner

6. “My life feels like a book left out on the porch, and the wind blows the pages faster and faster, turning always toward a new chapter faster than I can stop to read it.”

— Nancy E. Turner

7. “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 the glass.”

— Nancy E. Turner

8. “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.”

— Nancy E. Turner

9. “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

10. “How is it possible for me to feel so young and so old at the same time?”

— Nancy E. Turner

11. “A clock only turns one direction.”

— Nancy E. Turner

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

— Nancy E. Turner

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Nancy E. Turner

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Sometimes I feel like a tree on a hill, at the place where all the wind blows and the hail hits the hardest. All the people I love are down the side aways, sheltered under a great rock, and I am out of the fold, standing alone in the sun and the snow. I feel like I am not part of the rest somehow, although they welcome me and are kind. I see my family as they sit together and it is like they have a certain way between them that is beyond me. I wonder if other folks ever feel included yet alone.”

— Nancy E. Turner

19. “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

20. “I would tear them apart with my bare hands to save my baby April. I wonder if all mothers feel this way. Suddenly I knew why it is so dangerous to mess with a bear with cubs or any wild animal with babies. I am part and parcel with them when it comes to that. Lord, there is a mountain lion side of me I never knew before.”

— Nancy E. Turner

21. “I make believe all my dear ones are not gone, just out of my line of sight beyond some curtain or cluster of people, or tree.”

— Nancy E. Turner

22. “The best cure for sadness is doing something.”

— Nancy E. Turner

23. “Our children weigh hard on my heart, and thinking about them growing up honest and healthy, or just living to grow up at all, makes a load in my chest that is bigger than the safe at the bank, and more valuable to me than all the gold inside it.”

— Nancy E. Turner

24. “Sarah, he says, it isn’t like I’m some old codger you have to coddle. Well, I told him, I want you healthy, to be sure that someday you are.”

— Nancy E. Turner

25. “One thing I know, whispered Savannah, is that if he was quiet, and you were quiet, and neither of you minded it, then you are in love.”

— Nancy E. Turner

26. “Never forget, either of you, that there is always something greater than yourselves at work in the world. Look for it. Seek the whole truth, rather than letting the wind blow you as it will.”

— Nancy E. Turner

27. “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

28. “That man makes me feel like I have my bonnet on backwards.”

— Nancy E. Turner

29. “Taking up marriage is a good excuse for taking up cursing, I think.”

— Nancy E. Turner

30. “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

31. “I can hardly wait to read it all. But it seems I don’t have three minutes to rub together. Some time soon I will take it on, maybe when Charlie is a few months older.”

— Nancy E. Turner

32. “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.”

— Nancy E. Turner

33. “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

34. “I thought I was leading them, but the truth was, I was just following them, holding up a lantern.”

— Nancy E. Turner

35. “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

36. “Or were we all only part of each other’s lives for a moment, putting down our swords long enough to win a war against a common enemy? Would we be friends if we’d met any other way?”

— Nancy E. Turner

37. “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

38. “A lad who wears his every thought upon his face is asking for someone to change his opinions.”

— Nancy E. Turner

39. “Education doesn’t keep a person from being a fool, and the lack of it doesn’t keep a person from being intelligent.”

— Nancy E. Turner

40. “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

41. “I have named the star Jack’s Star. It is beautiful and bright and gives me joy when it is here and pain when it is not, and every year as Summer approaches I have seen it coming over the hills. I used to think that someday i will learn what educated people have called it and why it is only here sometimes, but now i think it wouldn’t matter. It is Jack’s Star, and they only have to ask and I will tell them it’s name. They will have to ask the star itself where it goes and why it is not content to stay.”

— Nancy E. Turner

42. “I was going through the botanical theory book, and while I was reading I remembered something Blue Horse said to me back before Gilbert was born. He said wisdom is not a path, it is a tree.”

— Nancy E. Turner

43. “I am my own tapestry, then, made as I could for myself. Some holes in my fabric have been made by others, some torn by chance. Missing threads in the weave represent all those I have loved who died so long before me.”

— Nancy E. Turner

44. “I realized that poverty was a kind of captivity.”

— Nancy E. Turner

45. “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

46. “You cannot apologize for my feelings. You may apologize for your actions.”

— Nancy E. Turner

47. “In my head I remember that day the Indian man came and hollered at our camp and hadn’t hurt anyone yet and I think that he was trying to say something, but no one will lift their eyes when I speak so I don’t say anything.”

— Nancy E. Turner

48. “The thought came to me like a revelation of sorts, that all the world would be better if people were blind. Everyone. Or if we could always have a huge war or something to work against, so that people could just sing and eat fudge in their living rooms with any-one they wanted to.”

— Nancy E. Turner

49. “Life is short and must be lived.”

— Nancy E. Turner

50. “My rosebush shouts beauty to the world.”

— Nancy E. Turner