“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”
―“For equipment she had youth, curiosity, a steel strong frame...four hundred ninety-seven dollars; and a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps, painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and Burgundy, crysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”
― So Big“Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.”
―“Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.”
―“Whoever said love conquers all was a fool. Because almost everything conquers love - or tries to.”
― Giant“Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.”
―“Any piece of furniture, I don't care how beautiful it is, has got to be lived with, and kicked about, and rubbed down, and mistreated..., and repolished, and knocked around and dusted and sat on or slept in or eaten off of before it develops its real character," Selina said.”
― So Big“A closed mind is a dying mind.”
―“Some day I'll probably marry a horny-handed son of a toil, and if I do it'll be the horny hands that will win me. If you want to know, I like 'em with their scars on them. There's something about a man who has fought for it - I don't know what it is - a look in his eye - the feel of his hand. He needn't have been successful - thought he probably would be. I don't know. I'm not very good at this analysis stuff. I know he - well, you haven't a mark on you. Not a mark. You quit being an architect, or whatever it was, because architecture was an uphill disheartening job at the time. I don't say that you should have kept on. For all I know you were a bum architect. But if you had kept on - if you had loved it enough to keep on - fighting, and struggling, and sitcking it out - why, that fight would show in your face to-day - in your eyes and your jaw and your hands and in your way of standing and walking and sitting and talking. Listen. I'm not critcizing you. But you're all smooth. I like 'em bumpy.”
― So Big“I'm not much to look at", replied Elizabeth, "but I'm beautiful inside.”
― Half Portions“I never go to weddings. Waste of time. Person can get married a dozen times. Lots of folks do. Family like ours, know everybody in the state of Texas and around outside, why, you could spend your life going to weddings. But a funeral, that's different. You only die once.”
― Giant“She faced him, sitting up very straight in bed, the little wool shawl hunched about her shoulders. “Dirk, are you ever going back to architecture? The war is history, it’s now or never with you. Pretty soon it will be too late. Are you ever going back to architecture? To your profession?
A clean amputation. “No, Mother.”
She gave an actual gasp, as though icy water had been thrown full in her face. She looked suddenly old, tired. Her shoulders sagged. He stood in the doorway, braced for her reproaches. But when she spoke it was to reproach herself. “Then I’m a failure.”
“Oh, what nonsense, Mother. I’m happy. You can’t live somebody else’s life. You used to tell me, when I was a kid I remember, that life wasn’t just an adventure, to be taken as it came, with the hope that something glorious was hidden just around the corner. You said you had lived that way and it hadn’t worked. You said ——”
She interrupted him with a little cry. “I know I did. I know I did.” Suddenly she raised a warning finger. Her eyes were luminous, prophetic. “Dirk, you can’t desert her like that!”
“Desert who?” He was startled.
“Beauty! Self-expression. Whatever you want to call it. You wait! She’ll turn on you some day. Some day you’ll want her, and she won’t be there.”
― So Big“Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns, or villages. They have had time to dream in their adolescence. No cars to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty, energy-consuming occupations of the city child. Little that is competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the most impressionable period, long evenings for reading, long afternoons in the fields or woods.”
― Fanny Herself“If it's freedom you want, come to Texas. No one there tells you what to do and how you have to do it.”
― Giant“About mistakes it's funny. You've got to make your own; and not only that, if you try to keep people from making theirs, they get mad.”
― So Big“A closed country is a dying country... A closed mind is a dying mind.' from a radio broadcast in 1947”
―“It's been my experience," observed Emma McChesney, "that when a firm condescends to pay a woman twice as much as a man, that means she's worth six times as much.”
― Personality Plus: Some Experiences Of Emma McChesney And Her Son, Jock“It's fun telling you tall Texas tales. You always look like a little girl who's hearing Cinderella for the first time.”
― Giant“Sweat and blood and health and youth go into every cabbage. Did you know that, Julie? One doesn't despise them as food, knowing that.”
― So Big“She read absorbedly books found in boarding-house parlours, in hotels, in such public libraries as the times afforded. She was alone for hours a day, daily. Frequently her father, fearful of loneliness for her, brought her an armful of books and she had an orgy, dipping and swooping about among them in a sort of gourmand's ecstasy of indecision. In this way, at fifteen, she knew the writings of Byron, Jane Austen, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Felicia Hemans. Not to speak of Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, Bertha M. Clay, and that good fairy of the scullery, the Fireside Companion, in whose pages factory girls and dukes were brought together as inevitably as steak and onions. These last were, of course, the result of Selina's mode of living, and were loaned to her by kind-hearted landladies, chambermaids, and waitresses all the way from California to New York.”
―“He sat looking down at his hands--his fine strong unscarred hands. Suddenly and unreasonably he thought of another pair of hands--his mother's--with the knuckles enlarged, the skin broken--expressive--her life written on them. Scars. She had them.”
― So Big“Authors should be read but not seen; rarely are they a winsome sight.”
― Edna Farber“Death-bed promises should be broken as lightly as they are seriously made.”
― The Gay Old Dog“I'm tired of hearing you men say that this and that and the other isn't woman's work. Any work is woman's work that a woman can do well.”
― Roast Beef Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney
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