The Big Rock Candy Mountain Quotes

“There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

“People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
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She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

“Home was a curious thing, like happiness. You never knew you had had it until it was gone.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

“Where do I belong in this country? Where is home?”
― Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

“Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother’s gentleness and resilience, his father’s enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

“…the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy. A man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?”
― Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

“within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. —”
― Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

“The driver of an automobile on a lonely road is a set of perceptions mounted in the forehead of a mechanical monster.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

“There hadn’t really been any decision. As she dragged the round-topped trunk up the steps and propped its lid against the table, she was thinking that you never really made up your mind to anything. You simply bent where the pressure was greatest. You didn’t surrender, because surrender was annihilation, but you gave before the pressure.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

“girl of eighteen named Elsa Norgaard,”
― Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain