My Ántonia quotes

He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways, and is sometimes away from his New York office for weeks together. That is one reason why we do not often meet.

Another is that I do not like his wife.

When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way in New York, his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage. Genevieve Whitney was the only daughter of a distinguished man.

He seemed to us an experienced and worldly man who had been almost everywhere; in his conversation he threw out lightly the names of distant states and cities. He wore the rings and pins and badges of different fraternal orders to which he belonged.

Even his cuff-buttons were engraved with hieroglyphics, and he was more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk.

Once when he sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from “across the water” whose destination was the same as ours.

I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long day’s journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed so many rivers that I was dull to them.

The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

I had been sleeping, curled up in a red plush seat, for a long while when we reached Black Hawk. Jake roused me and took me by the hand.

I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter.

Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.

I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don’t think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.

I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

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.

No, there was nothing but land—slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.

The little trees were insignificant against the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea.

The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up.

And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.

That’s a badger hole. He’s about as big as a big possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once in a while, but I won’t let the men harm him.

In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals.

I like to have him come out and watch me when I’m at work.”

I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. 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.

At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen.

I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. 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. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Fuchs’s story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains.

Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields, looking for the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon turned a rich copper color and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like cocoons about the swollen joints of the …

Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth and had a hawk’s nest in its branches.

Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.

It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.

Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.

It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.

Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests underground with the dogs.

As far as we could see, the miles of copper-red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of the day. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows.

The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.

That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero’s death—heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero’s death—heroes who died young and gloriously.

It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

How many an afternoon Ántonia and I have trailed along the prairie under that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted before us or followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.

The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero’s death—heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.

How many an afternoon Ántonia and I have trailed along the prairie under that magnificence! And always two long black shadows flitted before us or followed after, dark spots on the ruddy grass.

We had been silent a long time, and the edge of the sun sank nearer and nearer the prairie floor, when we saw a figure moving on the edge of the upland, a gun over his shoulder.

Even the mother was always offering me things, though I knew she expected substantial presents in return. We stood there in friendly silence, while the feeble minstrel sheltered in Ántonia’s hair went on with its scratchy chirp.

The old man’s smile, as he listened, was so full of sadness, of pity for things, that I never afterward forgot it.

As the sun sank there came a sudden coolness and the strong smell of earth and drying grass. Ántonia and her father went off hand in hand, and I buttoned up my jacket and raced my shadow home.

I was glad that this project was one of futurity.

There never were such people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had.

Even the mother was always offering me things, though I knew she expected substantial presents in return. We stood there in friendly silence, while the feeble minstrel sheltered in Ántonia’s hair went on with its scratchy chirp.

As I turned him over, I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind of respect for his age and size.

He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil.

Certainly his kind have left horrible unconscious memories in all warm-blooded life. When we dragged him down into the draw, Dude sprang off to the end of his tether and shivered all over—wouldn’t let us come near him.

A snake of his size, in fighting trim, would be more than any boy could handle.

So in reality it was a mock adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for many a dragon-slayer.

I had been adequately armed by Russian Peter; the snake was old and lazy; and I had Ántonia beside me, to appreciate and admire.

They hauled him home and put him into his bed, and there he lay, very ill indeed.

Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away.

The Russians had such bad luck that people were afraid of them and liked to put them out of mind.

Peter, crouching in the front seat, saw nothing. The first thing either of them noticed was a new sound that broke into the clear air, louder than they had ever heard it before—the bell of the monastery of their own village, ringing for early prayers.

Pavel and Peter drove into the village alone, and they had been alone ever since.

They were run out of their village. Pavel’s own mother would not look at him.

Pavel’s own mother would not look at him. They went away to strange towns, but when people learned where they came from, they were always asked if they knew the two men who had fed the bride to the wolves.

Wherever they went, the story followed them.

It took them five years to save money enough to come to America. They worked in Chicago, Des Moines, Fort Wayne, but they were always unfortunate. When Pavel’s health grew so bad, they decided to try farming.

I can still see those two men sitting on the bench; Otto’s close-clipped head and Jake’s shaggy hair slicked flat in front by a wet comb. I can see the sag of their tired shoulders against the whitewashed wall.

What good fellows they were, how much they knew, and how many things they had kept faith with!

Fuchs had been a cowboy, a stage-driver, a bartender, a miner; had wandered all over that great Western country and done hard work everywhere, though, as grandmother said, he had nothing to show for it. Jake was duller than Otto.

Jake with his heavy features, so rudely moulded that his face seemed, somehow, unfinished; Otto with his half-ear and the savage scar that made his upper lip curl so ferociously under his twisted mustache.

As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenseless.

These boys had no practiced manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. They had only their hard fists to batter at the world with.

As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practiced manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance.

They had only their hard fists to batter at the world with.

Otto was already one of those drifting, case-hardened laborers who never marry or have children of their own. Yet he was so fond of children!

Grandfather’s prayers were often very interesting. He had the gift of simple and moving expression.

Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.

His prayers reflected what he was thinking about at the time, and it was chiefly through them that we got to know his feelings and his views about things.

I saw grandmother look apprehensively at grandfather. He was rather narrow in religious matters, and sometimes spoke out and hurt people’s feelings. There had been nothing strange about the tree before, but now, with someone kneeling before it—images, candles …

Grandfather merely put his fingertips to his brow and bowed his venerable head, thus Protestantizing the atmosphere.

We persuaded our guest to stay for supper with us. He needed little urging. As we sat down to the table, it occurred to me that he liked to look at us, and that our faces were open books to him.

He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly.

“The prayers of all good people are good,” he said quietly.

and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence—the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset.

Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.

so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it.

I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me.

I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there;

She gave me a shrewd glance.

“He not Jesus,” she blustered; “he not know about the wet and the dry.”

I did not answer her; what was the use? As I sat waiting for the hour when Ambrosch and Ántonia would return from the fields, I watched Mrs. Shimerda at her work.

Her outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves, over the boot-tops. She kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her arms and throat were burned as brown as a sailor’s.

Her neck came up strongly out of her shoulders, like the bole of a tree out of the turf.

One sees that draft-horse neck among the peasant women in all old countries.

Otto pretended not to be surprised at Ántonia’s behavior.

He only lifted his brows and said, “You can’t tell me anything new about a Czech; I’m an Austrian.”

Grandfather was never a party to what Jake called our feud with the Shimerdas. Ambrosch and Ántonia always greeted him respectfully, and he asked them about their affairs and gave them advice as usual. He thought the future looked hopeful for them.

Mrs. Harling was short and square and sturdy-looking, like her house. Every inch of her was charged with an energy that made itself felt the moment she entered a room. Her face was rosy and solid, with bright, twinkling eyes and a stubborn little chin.

She was quick to anger, quick to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul.

How well I remember her laugh; it had in it the same sudden recognition that flashed into her eyes, was a burst of humor, short and intelligent. Her rapid footsteps shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever she came.

Mrs. Harling was short and square and sturdy-looking, like her house.

Every inch of her was charged with an energy that made itself felt the moment she entered a room.

Her face was rosy and solid, with bright, twinkling eyes and a stubborn little chin. She was quick to anger, quick to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul. How well I remember her laugh;

Her rapid footsteps shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever she came. She could not be negative or perfunctory about anything. Her enthusiasm, and her violent likes and dislikes, asserted themselves in all the everyday occupations of life.

Washday was interesting, never dreary, at the Harlings’. Preserving-time was a prolonged festival, and housecleaning was like a revolution.

When Mrs. Harling made garden that spring, we could feel the stir of her undertaking through the willow hedge that separated our place from hers.

Lena only smiled her sleepy smile. “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.

”

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, and the houses seem to draw closer together.

“This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.”

It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.

If I loitered on the playground after school, or went to the post-office for the mail and lingered to hear the gossip about the cigar-stand, it would be growing dark by the time I came home. The sun was gone;

I can remember how glad I was when there happened to be a light in the church, and the painted glass window shone out at us as we came along the frozen street.

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, shivering and talking until our feet were like lumps of ice.

We all liked Tony’s stories. Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky, and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it.

Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart.

One evening when we were picking out kernels for walnut taffy, Tony told us a new story.

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.

Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day.

When boys and girls are growing up, life can’t stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.

It must have been in June, for Mrs. Harling and Ántonia were preserving cherries, when I stopped one morning to tell them that a dancing pavilion had come to town. I had seen two drays hauling the canvas and painted poles up from the depot.

There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Ántonia’s father. Yet people saw no difference between her and the three Marys; they were all Bohemians, all “hired girls.”

I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into their own, and I have.

Today the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses.

The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons.

The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth.

Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house;

He was so fastidious and prim about his place that a boy would go to a good deal of trouble to throw a dead cat into his back yard, or to dump a sackful of tin cans in his alley.

It was a peculiar combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness that made Cutter seem so despicable.

He had certainly met his match when he married Mrs. Cutter. She was a terrifying-looking person; almost a giantess in height, rawboned, with iron-gray hair, a face always flushed, and prominent, hysterical eyes.

When she meant to be entertaining and agreeable, she nodded her head incessantly and snapped her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and curved, like a horse’s; people said babies always cried if she smiled at them.

Her face had a kind of fascination for me: it was the very color and shape of anger.

There was a gleam of something akin to insanity in her full, intense eyes. She was formal in manner, and made calls in rustling, steel-gray brocades and a tall bonnet with bristling aigrettes.

Once when they had quarreled about household expenses, Mrs. Cutter put on her brocade and went among their friends soliciting orders for painted china, saying that Mr. Cutter had compelled her “to live by her brush.”

Cutter wasn’t shamed as she had expected; he was delighted!

Cutter often threatened to chop down the cedar trees which half-buried the house. His wife declared she would leave him if she were stripped of the “privacy” which she felt these trees afforded her. That was his opportunity, surely;

This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People’s speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution.

The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.

The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all. On Tuesday nights the Owl Club danced;

I knew it would be useless to acquaint my elders with any such plan. Grandfather didn’t approve of dancing, anyway; he would only say that if I wanted to dance I could go to the Masonic Hall, among “the people we knew.”

It was just my point that I saw altogether too much of the people we knew.

My bedroom was on the ground floor, and as I studied there, I had a stove in it. I used to retire to my room early on Saturday night, change my shirt and collar and put on my Sunday coat.

She danced every dance like a waltz, and it was always the same waltz—the waltz of coming home to something, of inevitable, fated return. After a while one got restless under it, as one does under the heat of a soft, sultry summer day.

When you spun out into the floor with Tony, you didn’t return to anything. You set out every time upon a new adventure.

I liked to schottische with her; she had so much spring and variety, and was always putting in new steps and slides. She taught me to dance against and around the hard-and-fast beat of the music.

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.

The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red.

There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.

Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth.

His zest in debauchery might wane, but never Mrs. Cutter’s belief in it. The reckoning with his wife at the end of an escapade was something he counted on—like the last powerful liqueur after a long dinner.

The one excitement he really couldn’t do without was quarreling with Mrs. Cutter!

We played tennis, read, and took long walks together. I shall always look back on that time of mental awakening as one of the happiest in my life.

Gaston Cleric introduced me to the world of ideas; when one first enters that world everything else fades for a time, and all that went before is as if it had not been.

Yet I found curious survivals; some of the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting for me in the new.

Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over me, as it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and the poetry of Virgil.

If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.

I understood that clearly, for the first time. This revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it might suddenly vanish.

When I turned back to my room the place seemed much pleasanter than before.

Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight.

How I loved to hear her laugh again! It was so soft and unexcited and appreciative—gave a favorable interpretation to everything. When I closed my eyes I could hear them all laughing—the Danish laundry girls and the three Bohemian Marys.

She was inflexible about paying for her own seat; said she was in business now, and she wouldn’t have a schoolboy spending his money on her. I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true.

It was like going to revival meetings with someone who was always being converted.

She handed her feelings over to the actors with a kind of fatalistic resignation. Accessories of costume and scene meant much more to her than to me.

The Count of Monte Cristo, which I had seen James O’Neill play that winter, was by the only Alexandre Dumas I knew. This play, I saw, was by his son, and I expected a family resemblance.

A couple of jackrabbits, run in off the prairie, could not have been more innocent of what awaited them than were Lena and I.

Our excitement began with the rise of the curtain, when the moody Varville, seated before the fire, interrogated Nanine. Decidedly, there was a new tang about this dialogue.

The idea is one that no circumstances can frustrate.

Wherever and whenever that piece is put on, it is April.

Thomas’s dressmaking shop. Those formal phrases, the very flower of small-town proprieties, and the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their origin, became very funny, very engaging, when they were uttered in Lena’s soft voice, with her caressing intonation and arch naivete.

Nothing could be more diverting than to hear Lena, who was almost as candid as Nature, call a leg a “limb” or a house a “home.”

We used to linger a long while over our coffee in that sunny corner. Lena was never so pretty as in the morning;

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.

”

Lena laughed. “Well, it’s mainly because I don’t want a husband.

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.”

At last she sent me away with her soft, slow, renunciatory kiss. “You aren’t sorry I came to see you that time?” she whispered. “It seemed so natural. I used to think I’d like to be your first sweetheart. You were such a funny kid!”

She always kissed one as if she were sadly and wisely sending one away forever.

We said many goodbyes before I left Lincoln, but she never tried to hinder me or hold me back. “You are going, but you haven’t gone yet, have you?” she used to say.

She turned her bright, believing eyes to me, and the tears came up in them slowly, “How can it be like that, when you know so many people, and when I’ve disappointed you so?

Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?

I’m so glad we had each other when we were little. I can’t wait till my little girl’s old enough to tell her about all the things we used to do. You’ll always remember me when you think about old times, won’t you?

“Perhaps you will”—I felt rather than saw her smile. “

But even if you don’t, you’re here, like my father. So I won’t be lonesome.

”

But I kept putting it off until the next trip. I did not want to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it. 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.

I owe it to Lena Lingard that I went to see Ántonia at last. I was in San Francisco two summers ago when both Lena and Tiny Soderball were in town.

I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered—about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded.

Whatever else was gone, Ántonia had not lost the fire of life.

Her skin, so brown and hardened, had not that look of flabbiness, as if the sap beneath it had been secretly drawn away.

If it hadn’t been for what Mrs. Harling taught me, I expect I’d have brought them up like wild rabbits. No, I’m glad I had a chance to learn; but I’m thankful none of my daughters will ever have to work out.

The trouble with me was, Jim, I never could believe harm of anybody I loved.

”

She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one’s breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.

She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.

All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.

It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight.

She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.

His smile showed the strong teeth of which his wife was so proud, and as he saw me his lively, quizzical eyes told me that he knew all about me.

He looked like a humorous philosopher who had hitched up one shoulder under the burdens of life, and gone on his way having a good time when he could.

He advanced to meet me and gave me a hard hand, burned red on the back and heavily coated with hair.