A Sudden Country Quotes

“Because affection, she had learned, was such a civilized thing, compared to love. It exacted so much less and was therefore more enduring. And endurable.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“He thought, This country does attract fanatics and torment them.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“He looked around, saw himself mirrored in that man walking back with his rifle. And suddenly, it seemed possible to him that we might love ourselves the most when we are suffering and seen to suffer. The pursuits of men seemed only the more shocking, if this were true.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“It was a fine country, or would be, different from any she had known. But if it was the promised land, it was not because of the trees or climate, but because, just getting here, they'd found something new inside themselves.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“We cannot choose, he thought, the people we're born into nor what they teach us. So that opposition exists, and appears to us as evil. It is part of life, and sorrow is its natural consequence.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“She looked at him. He saw her tendrils of damp hair. He looked off, but he had never felt this thing so deep before, this need to speak, to say how far he had been swept from what is good, and the sense seemed doubtful and unmanly.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“The country was so vast, of course, that one or a hundred or a thousand men could have very little effect. And how, anyway, could one fault a people bringing schools and churches and all the goods of industry? Still, there was always something about newcomers laying claim that made him uneasy, as though he were being robbed some way, or made to give over something he had never thought to value.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“No, love could not be some great heedless unchanging thing. It was shifting ground, changing balance day to day. A word, a gift, a memory, a failed intention. We are only people being as we are, she thought. Anything else is self-deception.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“Ideas will not save us, he thought. Not right or wrong not peace or retribution. Our stories are all we have. The only thing that can ever save us is to learn each other's stories. From beginning to end.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“So she fell into a black silence, she who had not been entitled to choose which home, which life. Who had gone out in a buggy a few times with a man of an age to be her father, ... agreed to marry. Who had accepted, not chosen. Because she was not a man.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“... Lucy stood thinking how little point there seemed in any past so far away, and how little point there seemed in talking of the future over which they had not the least control, toiling as they were toward something she could scarcely imagine.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“Now she could only shape him to her own ideal. She preferred him as a father, tall and gentle-voiced. She tried him in good clothes. She sat him gravely in a parlor, amid the rustle of silk dresses. She heard the clink of silver on a china rim.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country

“The men booted them on, cursing such deep animal persistence as was not satisfied by the snuffing of one or ten or thirty, but would, if not moved otherwise, stop and consider each offering on the chance that one might hold some new clarification on the unseen nature of things, some great and final proof of meaning to be divined from the excrement of buffalo.”
― Karen Fisher, A Sudden Country