Wallace Stegner · 576 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 (Contemporary American Fiction)
“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 (Contemporary American Fiction)
“Where do I belong in this country? Where is home?”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Contemporary American Fiction)
“girl of eighteen named Elsa Norgaard,”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Contemporary American Fiction)
“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 (Contemporary American Fiction)
Wallace Stegner
Born place: in Lake Mills, Iowa, The United States
Born date February 18, 1909
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“[…] A book is a huge cemetery in which on the majority of the tombs the names are effaced and cano no longer be read. Sometimes on the other hand we remember a name well enough but do not know whether anything of the individual who bore it survives in our pages. That girl with the very deep-set eyes and the drawling voice, is she here? and if she is, in what part of the ground does she lie? we no longer know, and how are we to find her beneath the flowers? But sine we live at a great distance from other human beings, since even our strongest feelings and in this class had been my love for my grandmother and for Albertine — at the end of a few years have vanished from our hearts and become for us merely a word which we do not understand, since we can talk casually of these dead people with fashionable acquaintances whose houses we still visit with pleasure though all that we loved has died, surely then, if there exists a method by which we can learn to undrstand these forgotten words once more, is it not our duty to make use of it, even if this means transcribing them first into a language which is universal but which for that very reason will at least be permanent, a language which may make out of those who are no more, in their truest essence, a lasting acquisition for the minds of all mankind? And as for that law of change which made these loved words unintelligible to us, if we succeed at least in explaining it, is not even our infirmity transformed into strength of a new kind?”
― Marcel Proust, quote from Time Regained
“Valuables. That was a hot one, Richards thought, unbuttoning his shirt. He had an empty wallet with a few pictures of Sheila and Cathy, a receipt for a shoe sole he had replaced at the local cobbler's six months ago, a keyring with no keys on it except for the doorkey, a baby sock that he did not remember putting in there, and the package of Blams he had gotten from the machine.”
― Richard Bachman, quote from The Running Man
“...what is written on paper affects history. But not life. Life is a different history.”
― Mario Puzo, quote from The Sicilian
“And I knew that tone, the pleading, the fear that was sitting like a spiked ball in his chest. He'd been left behind too, maybe more than I had.”
― Lili St. Crow, quote from Reckoning
“Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.”
― Stephen King, quote from The Mist
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