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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“Since it was announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has condemned my works and criticized them harshly. All of my works are now banned from getting into China or being published in China. What author would want to return to a country that banned his or her books?”
― Gao Xingjian, quote from One Man's Bible
“In a city like San Francisco, you can throw a rock out your front door and hit someone with a nice ass and pretty brown eyes. But to find someone you want to fall asleep with, someone you want to breathe and dream next to, is terribly rare.”
― Will Christopher Baer, quote from Hell's Half Acre
“In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy about this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic "what your country can do for you" implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man's belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, "what you can do for your country" implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshiped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.”
― Milton Friedman, quote from Capitalism and Freedom
“Hawke's gaze was so innocent, Andrew knew it was pure bullshit”
― Nalini Singh, quote from Play of Passion
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― Agatha Christie, quote from Cat Among the Pigeons
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