Sweet Promised Land Quotes

“All of us together were of a generation born of old country people who spoke English with an accent and prayed in another language, who drank red wine and cooked their food in the old country way, and peeled apples and pears after dinner.”
― Robert Laxalt, Sweet Promised Land

“I reached out and touched him on the arm and said uncertainly, "They want us to come back."

Without turning, he shook his head and cried shakenly, "I can't go back. It ain't my country any more. I've lived too much in America ever to go back." And then, angrily, "Don't you know that?"

...Then I saw a cragged face that that land had filled with hope and torn with pain, had changed from young to old, and in the end had claimed. And then, I did know it.”
― Robert Laxalt, Sweet Promised Land

“There was Jaones Ergela, or Crazy Joh, who had lost his mind from loneliness in the mountains and had not seen it coming soon enough to shoot himself, as the others like him had done.”
― Robert Laxalt, Sweet Promised Land

“Well, you know what they say about the devil," said my father. "He spent a thousand years trying to learn the language so he could tempt them, and then he gave it up, and that's why no Basques ever go to hell.”
― Robert Laxalt, Sweet Promised Land

“What was worse, she was also convinced that, with his habit of talking to strangers, he would be led astray in Paris, and, as she put it, get knocked over the head by some villainous Apache, and as a result never make it to the Pyrenees.”
― Robert Laxalt, Sweet Promised Land

“He had left home one day, yesterday, and come home today, and the change was too much for him to bear. And this was why he could not go home all at once.”
― Robert Laxalt, Sweet Promised Land

“Because we were born of old country people in a new land, and, right or wrong, we had not felt equal to those around us, and had had to do a little more than they in everything we did.”
― Robert Laxalt, Sweet Promised Land

“Here, where we had done the most of our growing up, the old family home had been a fortress against the world. This is something that the children of immigrants all know.”
― Robert Laxalt, Sweet Promised Land