My Ántonia Quotes
"I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America."
"The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska."
"There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. There was nothing but land."
"Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out."
"When the first light spray of snow lay over it, it came out with wonderful distinctness, like strokes of Chinese white on canvas."
"As long as I live, I shall never forget the sweetness and gaiety of those dances."
"All the years that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first glorious autumn."
"It was a day of amber sunlight, but there was a shiver of coming winter in the air."
"The great land had never looked to me so big and free."
"I was convinced that man's strongest antagonist is the cold."
"Legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches."
"I won’t have none of your weevily wheat, and I won’t have none of your barley, But I’ll take a measure of fine white flour, to make a cake for Charley."
"Jake-y, Jake-y, sell the pig and pay the slap!"
"I never made anything to him with my eyes. I can’t help it if he hangs around, and I can’t order him off. It ain’t my prairie."
"I like your grandmother, and all things here."
"You can do what you please when you go out, can’t you?"
"I don’t want to marry Nick, or any other man."
"I won’t stand by and see that child frightened into spasms. She is too little to understand what you want of her. Let her alone."
"I’ll come sometime, but Mrs. Harling don’t like to have me run much."
"Now you’ve come, you must try to do right and be a credit to us."
"You need not pay me anything more; no more money. The cow is yours."
"The girl will be happy here, and she’ll forget those things."
"My papa sad for the old country. He not look good. He never make music any more."
"If he’ll let me alone, I’ll let him alone."
"The girl won’t be awkward and rough at first, like enough."
"He not Jesus," she blustered; "he not know about the wet and the dry."
"We’d be hard put to it now, if you didn’t know, Otto."
"Winter comes down savagely over a little town on the prairie."
"The wind that sweeps in from the open country strips away all the leafy screens that hide one yard from another in summer."
"The roofs, that looked so far away across the green treetops, now stare you in the face."
"This is reality, whether you like it or not."
"In the winter bleakness a hunger for color came over people, like the Laplander’s craving for fats and sugar."
"Without knowing why, we used to linger on the sidewalk outside the church when the lamps were lighted early for choir practice or prayer-meeting."
"The crude reds and greens and blues of that colored glass held us there."
"Dancing became popular now, just as roller skating had been the summer before."
"The Black Hawk boys looked forward to marrying Black Hawk girls, and living in a brand-new little house with best chairs that must not be sat upon, and hand-painted china that must not be used."
"Ántonia's success at the tent had its consequences."
"I hated to enter the still house when I went home from the dances, and it was long before I could get to sleep."
"Morning after morning I used to pace up and down my sunny little room, looking off at the distant river bluffs and the roll of the blond pastures between."
"It was the high season for summer flowers."
"The pink bee-bush stood tall along the sandy roadsides, and the coneflowers and rose mallow grew everywhere."
"Across the wire fence, in the long grass, I saw a clump of flaming orange-colored milkweed, rare in that part of the state."
"The enthusiasm for the dance, which the Vannis had kindled, did not at once die out."
"Ántonia often went to the dances with Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor who was a kind of professional ladies' man."
"I stood watching their white dresses glimmer smaller and smaller down the sidewalk as they went away."
"I have had no other success that pulled at my heartstrings like that one."
"I love them as if they were people," she said, rubbing her hand over the bark.
"I thought if he saw how well I could do for him, he’d want to stay with me."
"I can’t help it. You know I do. Maybe it’s because he came on Easter day, I don’t know."
"I’ve always had good health, thank God, and I was able to help him in the fields until right up to the time before my babies came."
"I’ve never had them out here. And I don’t mind work a bit, if I don’t have to put up with sadness."
"My Martha’s married now, and has a baby of her own. Think of that, Jim!"
"The first ten years were a hard struggle."
"You ought never to have gone to town, Tony," I said, wondering at her.
"I can't believe it's you, sitting here, in my own kitchen."
"I never could believe harm of anybody I loved."
"We were easy and confidential with me, as if I were an old friend of the family."
"Sometimes, it doesn’t occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty."
"She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true."
"She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races."
"I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is."
"For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be."
"Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."