So Big Quotes
"The nickname had sprung from the early and idiotic question invariably put to babies and answered by them, with infinite patience, through the years of their infancy."
"How big is baby?" Selina would demand, senselessly. "How big is my man?"
"She, too, would open her tired arms wide, wide. Then they would say in a duet, his mouth a puckered pink petal, hers quivering with tenderness and a certain amusement, "So-o-o-o big!""
"Life has no weapons against a woman like that."
"The whole thing’s just a grand adventure," Simeon Peake had said.
"In five years—two—even one, perhaps, who knows but that she might be lying on lacy pillows on just such a bleak winter morning."
"In spite of her recent tragedy, her nineteen years, her loneliness, the terrifying thought of this new home to which she was going, among strangers, she was conscious of a warm little thrill of elation, of excitement—of adventure!"
"She was to learn that in High Prairie women did not brazenly intrude thus on men’s weighty conversation."
"When I am a man, and earning, I am going to buy my mother a silk dress like I saw in a store in Chicago and she should put it on every day, not only for Sunday; and sit in a chair and make little fine stitches like Widow Paarlenberg."
"What time is it, Celeste?" "It is now eleven o’clock, madame."
"Luck and nature seemed to work against him."
"To complete his discomfort, his household was inadequately ministered by an elderly and rheumatic female connection."
"It was known that she sent him a weekly baking of cakes, pies, and bread."
"She wooed him openly, notoriously, and with a Dutch vehemence that would have swept another man off his feet."
"A slow Dutch wrath rose in him against her; a male resentment at being manipulated by a woman."
"Knowing well that the entire community was urging him toward this profitable match with the plump, rich, red-lipped widow, Pervus set his will like a stubborn steer and would have none of her."
"The very first time that Pervus DeJong met Selina he had a chance to protect her."
"She stepped back and thought the effect enchanting."
"Pervus DeJong looked down into the startled eyes of Selina Peake."
"She sank her little white teeth into one of the absurd sandwiches and looked at him, expecting to find him laughing, too."
"You just waited, and lived your life as best you could, knowing that beauty might be just around the corner. You just waited, and then it came."
"I’m here to keep Dirk from making the mistakes I made."
"Life! You’ll be hoggin’ it all yourself and not know it."
"That isn’t the way. You take the best, and make the most of it."
"I want to give him all these things myself."
"All the worthwhile things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in candlelight. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures. People - all kinds of people. Work that you love."
"It’s beauty! I used to think that if you wanted beauty - if you wanted it hard enough and hopefully enough - it came to you."
"My life doesn’t count, except as something for Dirk to use."
"I wanted him to have everything. Beautiful things. I wanted his life to be beautiful."
"People said that things 'came easy' for Dirk. He said so himself, not boastfully, but rather shyly."
"She literally tore a living out of the earth with her two bare hands."
"Easier, yes. But you would have found a way, Selina. Some way."
"The Hempel Packing Company was a vast monster now stretching great arms into Europe, into South America."
"What do they want to go to work and make me out like that for? I sell good meat for all I can get for it. That’s business, ain’t it?"
"You bit off more as you can chaw. You choke yet. You see."
"Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief, Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief."
"It’s supposed to represent the Seine. The River Seine that flows through Paris into the countryside beyond."
"What dom talk! A river can’t see. Anybody knows that."
"I’d like to take that course myself, if you must know. They say it’s wonderful."
"I’m doing the work I’m interested in, for the person I love best in the world."
"What do you mean by ‘successful,’ Sobig? That’s not success. Roelf — the thing Roelf does — that’s success."
"I come with all I have. Devotion, hope, desire to learn, a promise to be a credit to you."
"I’ve done all kinds of work, I guess, except digging in a coal mine. I’d have done that if I’d had to."
"Persons at least twenty-one years of age, not seeking a degree, may be admitted... as unclassified students."
"What’s the difference, now? I’m not trying to be what they call an Influence in your life."
"I’m twenty-four. And I’m looking around."
"And even if I do, you and I can be just as good friends."
"They would have died for it — they almost had, what with privation, self-denial, work."
"I’d rather have my old maple table, mellow with age and rubbing, than all the mahogany library slabs on Wabash Avenue."
"You can’t have any idea what it means to me to be here. I used to dream about it."
"This is England. An older civilization, of course."
"Sometimes Selina, in pure sensuous delight, passed her gnarled, work-worn hand over his shoulders and down his fine, strong, straight back."
"Though she had always been a woman of dainty habits and fastidious tastes the grind of her early married life had left its indelible mark."
"Her eyes, in that frame, startled you by their unexpectedness, they were so calm, so serene, yet so alive."
"It wasn't a dressing table merely, but a laboratory."
"Some day I'm going to try it. There are so many things I'm going to try some day."
"I remember enough of my French at Miss Fister’s school to know that that means gilded youth."
"She employed none of the artifices of a youth-mad day."
"But now she must see him daily, or speak to him."
"Her voice, when she spoke to him, was an organ transformed; low, vibrant, with a timbre in its tone that would have made it unrecognizable to an outsider."
"I got the blues - I said the blues - I got the this or that - the somethingorother - blue - hoo-hoos."