The Awakening Land Quotes

“The Awakening Land" p613 If you made it easy for folks, it seemed like their hardihood had to pay for it. Didn't she know? Which one of her young ones was it she had raised the softest, done the most for, coaxed and prayed along, saved from bad things one time after the other? Wasn't it the same one that now could take life and his country the least and wanted to change God's world over from top to bottom? It was the same with sick folks, Sayward noticed. Once they had been taken care of too long, they got to feeling the world ought to be changed and softened , centered toward themselves.”
― Conrad Richter, The Awakening Land: The Trees, The Fields, & The Town

“The Awakening Land" p628-629 Hardship and work, that's what his mother always harped on. Once when he had refused to work on the lot, she had said, "You're going to live longer than I do, Chancey. Watch for all kinds of new-fangled notions to take away folks' troubles without their having to work. That's what folks today want and that's what will ruin them more than anything else." Could there be something after all in this hardship-and-work business, he pondered. He had thought hardship and work the symptoms of a pioneer era, things of the past. He believed that his generation had outlived and outlawed them, was creating a new life of comfort, ease and peace. And yet war, the cruelest hardship of all, war between brothers, was on them today like a madness. Did it mean that the need for strength and toughness was to be always with them; that the farther they advanced, the more brilliant and intelligent they became, the more terrible would be the hardship that descended upon them, and the more crying the need of hardihood to be saved.”
― Conrad Richter, The Awakening Land: The Trees, The Fields, & The Town

“The Awakening Land" p628 A strange, uneasy feeling ran over him. If he had been wrong about his mother in this, might he by any chance have been wrong in other things about her also? Could it be even faintly possible that the children of pioneers like himself, born under more benign conditions than their parents, hated them because they themselves were weaker, resented it when their parents expected them to be strong, and so invented all kinds of intricate reasoning to prove that their parents were tyrannical and cruel, their beliefs false and obsolete, and their accomplishments trifling? Never had his mother said that. But once long ago he had heard her mention, not in as many words, that the people were too weak to follow God today, that in the Bible God made strong demands on them for perfection, so the younger generation watered God down, made Him impotent and got up all kinds of reasons why they didn't have to follow Him but could go along their own way.”
― Conrad Richter, The Awakening Land: The Trees, The Fields, & The Town