How Much of These Hills Is Gold Quotes

“And wasn’t that the real reason for traveling, a reason bigger than poorness and desperation and greed and fury—didn’t they know, low in their bones, that as long as they moved and the land unfurled, that as long as they searched, they would forever be searchers and never quite lost?”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“I don't see how you can claim to own a place and treat it so poor, there are methods of getting what you want without tearing at the land like a pack of wild dogs.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“You should always ask why a person is telling you their story.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“What real riches are? I could spend this gold tomorrow and it would belong to someone else. No. I want us rich in choices, that's something noone can take.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“She thinks of the other direction. The hills where she was born, and the sun that bleaches sky and brightens grass. She thinks about when she stood in a dead lake and held what men desired and died for. She thinks that was nothing, really, compared to the way the noonday sun makes the grass blaze. Horizon to horizon a shimmer. Who could truly grasp it, the huge and maddening glint, the ever-shifting mirage, the grass that refused to be owned or pinned but changed with every angle of light: what that land was, and to whom, death or life, good or bad, lucky or unlucky, countless lives birthed and destroyed by its terror and generosity.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Too often truth ain’t in what’s right, Lucy girl—sometimes it’s in who speaks it. Or writes it.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“If she believes that tigers live, then does she believe that Indians are hunted and dying? If she believes in fish the size of men, does she believe in men who string up others like linefuls of catch? Easier to avoid that history, unwritten as it is except in the soughing of dry grass, in the marks of lost trails, in the rumors from the mouths of bored men and mean girls, in the cracked patterns of buffalo bone. Easier by far to read the history that Teacher Leigh teaches, those names and dates orderly as bricks, stacked to build a civilization”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“That feeling of knowing someone will call your name—that’s the feeling I got when your ma met my eyes. I knew I was almost home.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Stand long enough under open sky in these parts, and a curious thing happens. At first the clouds meander, aimless. Then they start to turn, swirling toward you at their center. Stand long enough and it isn’t the hills that shrink—it’s you that grows. Like you could step over and reach the distant blue mountains, if you so chose. Like you were a giant and all this your land.”
― C. Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Young enough to think desire alone shapes the world.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Burial is just another recipe”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Summer comes, bringing rumors of a tiger. The air is close and sweat-sticky. Cicadas, crickets, sighs, a dark ratcheting. A time for lingering after lamps are lit, for windows swung wide—a languorous heat in ordinary times, a loosening. But this year the tiger presses its claw against the vein of the town, and all Sweetwater shivers. A few chickens went missing three days back, and a side of beef. A guard dog was found with its throat slashed. Yesterday a woman fainted while hanging laundry and woke gibbering about a creature behind her sheets. A print left in the mud. Fear is this summer’s excitement, as hoops were last summer’s, and syrup over crushed ice the summer before’s. Anna, of course, wants a taste.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of Lucy feeling a sorrow kin to love. Because though these dry yellow hills yielded nothing but pain and sweat and misplaced hope—she knows them. A part of her is buried in them, a part of her lost in them, a part of her found and born in them—so many parts belong to this land. An ache in her chest like the tug of a dowsing rod. Across the ocean the people will look like them, but they won’t know the shapes of these hills, or the soughing of grass, or the taste of muddy water—all these things that shape Lucy within as her eyes and nose shape her without. Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of Lucy mourning, already, the loss of this land.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Because this land they live in is a land of missing things. A land stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tiger, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living. To move through this land and believe Ba's tales is to see each hill as a burial mound with its own crown of bones. Who could believe that and survive? Who could believe that and keep from looking, as Ba and Sam do, always toward the past? Letting it drag behind them. Letting it make them into fools.

And so Lucy fears that unwritten history. Easier to dismiss all Ba's tales as tall ones - because believe, and where does it end? If she believes that tigers live, then does she believe that Indians are hunted and dying? If she believes in fish the size of men, does she believe in men who string up others like linefuls of catch? Easier to avoid that history, unwritten as it is except in the soughing of dry grass, in the marks of lost trails, in the rumors from the mouths of bored men and mean girls, in the cracked patterns of buffalo bone. Easier by far to read the history that Teacher Leigh teaches, those names and dates orderly as bricks, stacked to build a civilization.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“What people see shapes how they treat you.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“The Shipping News.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Divisadero”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“What makes a ghost a ghost? Can a person be haunted by herself?”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Can a lake, without proper burial, become a ghost? Can a place remember, and hurt, and rage against what hurt it?”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“In Lucy’s fondest dream, the one she doesn’t want to wake from, she braves no dragons and tigers. Finds no gold. She sees wonders from a distance, her face unnoticed in the crowd. When she walks down the long street that leads her home, no one pays her any mind at”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“in Sam’s mind the shadow is the true height, the body a temporary inconvenience. When I’m a cowboy, Sam says. When I’m an adventurer. More recently: When I’m a famous outlaw. When I’m grown. Young enough to think desire alone shapes the world.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“Ba dies in the night, prompting them to seek two silver dollars.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“All your life you heard people say the story starts in '48; and all your life when people told you this story, did you ever question why?

They told it to shut you out. They told it to claim it; to make it theirs, not yours. They told it to say we came too late. Thieves they called us. They said this land could never be our land.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“When you were born, Lucy girl, you were like an anchor dropping on the ship your ma used to tell about: holding us down, holding us together. Holding us to this land. For that, I was always grateful.”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“But Lucy liked to hear about the next territory, and the next one, even farther East. Those flat plains where water is abundant and green stretches in every direction. Where towns have shade trees and paved roads, houses of wood and glass. Where instead of wet and dry there are seasons with names like song: autumn, winter, summer, spring. Where stores carry cloth in every color, candy in every shape. Civilization holds the word civil in its heart and so Lucy imagines kids who dress nice and speak nicer, storekeepers who smile, doors held open instead of slammed, and everything—handkerchiefs, floors, words—clean. A new place, where two girls might be wholly unremarkable. In Lucy’s fondest dream, the one she doesn’t want to wake from, she braves no dragons and tigers. Finds no gold. She sees wonders from a distance, her face unnoticed in the crowd. When she walks down the long street that leads her home, no one pays her any mind at”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold

“belief only makes the pain worse,”
― C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold