11 quotes
She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.
My Antonia (1918)
Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?
My Antonia (1918)
I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.
My Antonia (1918)
I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.
My Antonia (1918)
It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.
My Antonia (1918)
Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
My Antonia (1918)
In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
My Antonia (1918)
There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
My Antonia (1918)
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.
My Antonia (1918)
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
My Antonia (1918)
As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.
My Antonia (1918)