Wallace Stegner · 563 pages
Rating: (5.9K votes)
“There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain
“People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain
“Where do I belong in this country? Where is home?”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain
“girl of eighteen named Elsa Norgaard,”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain
“within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. —”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain
Wallace Stegner
Born place: in Lake Mills, Iowa, The United States
Born date February 18, 1909
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“Ram, taken by surprise at what was happening, rushed to stop his wife, hold her hand and pull her out, but the earth had closed before he could reach her. All that he could clutch were the ends of her hair that turned into blades of grass. Would the pain have been less had she chastised him before she left? Would the pain have been less had they at least spoken before she left? Would the pain have been less had she at least looked at him before she left? But then she was under no obligation. He had liberated her long ago from the burden of being Ram’s wife. But he would always be Sita’s husband.”
― Devdutt Pattanaik, quote from Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana
“Doctors, lawyers, and princes come and go. Oil money lasts forever.”
― quote from White Girl Problems
“My conclusion is that contrary to popular belief, atheism is not primarily an intellectual revolt, it is a moral revolt. Atheists don’t find God invisible so much as objectionable. They aren’t adjusting their desires to the truth, but rather the truth to fit their desires. This is something we can all identify with. It is a temptation even for believers. We want to be saved as long as we are not saved from our sins. We are quite willing to be saved from a whole host of social evils, from poverty to disease to war. But we want to leave untouched the personal evils, such as selfishness and lechery and pride. We need spiritual healing, but we do not want it. Like a supervisory parent, God gets in our way. This is the perennial appeal of atheism: it gets rid of the stern fellow with the long beard and liberates us for the pleasures of sin and depravity. The atheist seeks to get rid of moral judgment by getting rid of the judge.”
― Dinesh D'Souza, quote from What's So Great About Christianity
“Although Pirahã nouns are simple, Pirahã verbs are much more complicated. Each verb can have as many as sixteen suffixes—that is, up to sixteen suffixes in a row.”
― Daniel L. Everett, quote from Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
“Interpretation must itself be
evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts,
interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping
the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly,
stifling.”
― Susan Sontag, quote from Against Interpretation and Other Essays
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