Important Quotations Explained
1. During
that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning
to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had both known long
ago. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed
to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of
our childhood.
2. “I
never know you was so brave, Jim,” she went on comfortingly. “You
is just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you
go for him. Ain't you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake
home and show everybody. Nobody ain't seen in this kawn-tree so
big snake like you kill.”
3. “Why
aren't you always nice like this, Tony?”
“How nice?”
“Why, just like this; like yourself. Why do you all
the time try to be like Ambrosch?”
She put her arms under her head and lay back, looking
up at the sky. “If I live here, like you, that is different. Things will
be easy for you. But they will be hard for us.”
4. Presently
we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going
down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the
red disc rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great
black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang
to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized
what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing
in the field. 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. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing
pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness
somewhere on the prairie.
5. She
lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by
instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. 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.
