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.”
“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.”
“Where do I belong in this country? Where is home?”
“girl of eighteen named Elsa Norgaard,”
“within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. —”
“Our true wisdom is to embrace with meek docility, and without reservation, whatever the holy scriptures have delivered.”
“Don't believe in God. Love the world just the way it is. ”
“It’s a mother’s greatest joy and greatest burden, having children to worry about. You can’t have one without the other.”
“Your family is real, but mine isn't? Real people with real feelings, but my family isn't real to you. You think. I'm a character. A story. Those women you talk about. Not real people to you. Stupid women. I'm real. I'm as real as you are. My family is real like your family.”
“Humanity prevails over all other ideologies because one accept it or reject it for him but he cannot deny it because it is about him.”
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