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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“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, quote from الحرب والسلم [War and Peace]
“Os pensamentos que zoam no meu crânio são locatários de uma noite, meia dúzia de pares sem casa num ninho de amor passageiro, o fragor do guindaste da draga virá igualizar tudo, os momentos de deliciosa angústia do meu coração são roubados à sociedade de armadores que me emprega”
― Stig Dagerman, quote from De dömdas ö
“Third, one who is "in love" is not genuinely interested in fostering the personal growth of the other person. "If we have any purpose in mind when we fall in love it is to terminate our own loneliness and perhaps ensure this result through marriage.”
― Gary Chapman, quote from The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts
“I'm sorry. I shouldn't be working."
"Of course you should. I'm alright."
"Even F.I.N.E.?"
She laughed. "Especially that."
Fucked-up. Insecure. Neurotic. Egotistical.”
― Louise Penny, quote from Glass Houses
“I trust you, she had often told him. But was that true?
No, she realized, with a feeling like grief. All these years, even while she plotted with James, in her heart of hearts she had been waiting for him to betray her. When at last she had looked into his eyes and seen a host of dead enemies staring back, her mind had filled with a storm. But there had been an eye to that storm, a quiet core where a calm, relieved voice was saying: Ah, there it is at last. No more waiting for the sword to fall.”
― Frances Hardinge, quote from A Skinful of Shadows
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