Any piece of furniture, I don't care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated... and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character...A good deal like human beings.
(~Edna Ferber, So Big)

Any house that has enough porches, and two or three bathrooms and at least eight closets can be lived in comfortably, no matter what else it has or hasn't got.
(~Edna Ferber, So Big)

The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they're not pleasant things. That's living.
(~Edna Ferber, So Big)

Mothers were the same all through the centuries…a great sisterhood of love and service…the remembered and the unremembered alike. 
(~L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Ingleside)

“Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world's oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.” 
(~Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way)

Monday is like a spelling test that your teacher has just passed out, and you haven’t had time yet to make any mistakes. It’s like a blank piece of art paper that you haven’t messed up. Monday is like the second after your teacher asks you a mental math question in front of the whole class–but you haven’t given the wrong answer. Yet. Any good thing can happen on a Monday! 
(~Sally Warner, Ellray Jakes is NOT a chicken!)

 “See,” said Hook in answer to Smee’s question, “that is a mother. What a lesson! The nest must have fallen into the water, but would the mother desert her eggs? No.” 
(~J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan)