Nancy Byrd Turner

“The Bookshop has a thousand books,All colors, hues, and tinges,And every cover is a doorThat turns on magic hinges.”

“But this woman was all mother. A stern one, perhaps, and autocratic at times, and somewhat hard--but after all and in spite of all, intensely maternal. She did not look to large, far issues, nor did she know how to deal with subtleties and potentialityies; her business, from first to last, was the old elemental business of bearing and rearing. The sod, the hearth, the young that she had brought into the world, those were the trusts committed to her, and according to her best lights she was faithful to them.”

“The trouble is, we are incurable sentimentalists. We insist on makin over historical characters to suit our preconceived notions of what they should be, chipping, sandpapering, and polishing each personality until it assumes what we consider the proper contour and color.”

“She saw at last that her strange son was fired by some purpose which he would carry out or die. Seeing that, she finally currendered--the first casualty of the Revolution in Virginia. In so far as she herself realized, the sacrifice was made for George Wahington, but subconsciously she made it for his cause--just as unaware and obeying by blind instinct the laws of her nature, she had made him to begin with out of stuff that had been in the wearving a thousand years.”

“By nature and by training this woman was all for conservation of life. She had been brought up in rather a strict and narrow school. In her day although no one, certainly no woman, was expected to save humanity, every female was confidently expected to produce it. More than that, she was earnestly enjoined to guard and protect it. So Mary Ball and her successor Mary Washington, early imbibed not only a sense of the woman's responsibility for the family but a sense of her authority over it....At any rate, in this particular crisi she was merely obeying a law of nature as old as womanhood--to protect the creature she had brought into the world. There was no subtlety in her. She could not see the finer shadings of ths situation, the fact that in holding him back from the frontier she might be putting him into even greater peril. Her course was prompted by instinct and impulse, and she never thought of questioning the right or wrong of it. So, armed with the most primitive of all weapons, she faced her son for a hard fight.But she was pitted here against a temendous paradox. With her whole might she was resisting the demands of war, and yet it had been that very strength that had produced the warrior. Her opponent was remarkably like her--in strength of mind and body, in resolution, in force of will. Now, it is one of the ironies of life that sameness creates opposition. In the conflict that day at Mount Vernon, therefore, the contestants were fighting with identical weapons, even though from different spheres...George Washington must have been a very patient man. And if he had patience, that, too, came from her by that same theory of heredity that makes a firstborn son peculiarly like his mother. So this must be written in to her credity when for the third time she has to be recorded as trying to interrupt his destiny.As a last resort he used a weapon that she herself had put into his hand.Madam," he is said to have remarked with respectful finality, "the God to whom you commended me when first I went to war will be my protector stil.”

“Common sense...was one of the strongest ingredients of her character. She knew well enough that her fate was not to be an iota different from the fate of all mothers since the world began. her five would all go, somehow and somewhere, one by one. She would do what she coult to manage the goings, no doubt about that, but meanwhile their food must be prepared and their buttons sewed on to the best of her marked ability. And so they were.”

“It is safe to say that not all the cooking and sewing and farm management of an entire year signified as much hard work as the job of keeping those five children alive for a month. Their mother did it, though,...with never a murmur. It was not merely a part of her life's routine; it was her life itself.”

“It is perhaps too much to ask of hero worshippers that they peer back of the hero and consider the principal factor that shaped him for glory--that is, whoever it was that had charge of his grubby little boyhood.”

“Distinctively gentle he was, and trustworthy, and of special courtesy. His great physical strength was never used in combat, men remembered, except when needed for the defence of the weak. In the last hours, when his mind went roving over the past, he said to someone who stoody by: 'I thank god that in all my life I never struck a man in anger...Ishould have killed my antagonist and then his blood, at this awful moment, would have lain heavily on my soul....Idie at peace with all mankind.' (Referring to Augustine Washington, husband of Mary Ball and father of George Washington.)”