My Antonia - Quotes

A quote that represents Antonia at the beginning of the book

“Oh better I like to work out of doors than in a house… I like to be a man”

A quote that represents Antonia later in the first half of the book

“A girl like me has to take her good times when she can”

A quote that represents Antonia in the second half of the book

“I did not wish to find her aged and broken”

A quote representing Antonia at the end

“I know so many women who have kept the things she had lost, but whose inner glow had faded”

A quote representing Jim at the start of the novel

“I never know you was so brave, you is just like big mans”

A quote representing Jim later in the first half of the novel

“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy.

A quote that represents Jim early in the second half of the novel

Jim can never “settle down and grind” if he stays with Lena

A quote that represents Jim at the end of the novel

“Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again”

A quote representing Lena as she is introduced

“I never made anything to him with my eyes. I can’t help it if he hangs around and i can’t order him off. It ain’t my prairie.”

A quote about Lena later in the first half of the novel

“Short skirt with a reaping hook in her hand”

A quote about Lena early in the second half of the novel

“She was already at home in my place, she had slipped quietly into it as she did into everything”

A quote about Lena’s outcome

“I prefer to be foolish when i feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.

A quote that represents Antonia’s connection to others, and a kinder idea of Individualist philosophy

“We’d never have got through if I hadn’t been so strong”

A quote linking Antonia’s hard-working nature to the foundation of Individualism in America.

“She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”

A quote that shows Jim’s confusion surrounding his need for greater fulfillment, leading him to pursue competitive and materialistic goals.

He “seemed to have forgotten all reasonable explanations”

A quote implying Antonia is representative of wider ideas of America to Jim and his friend

“More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.”

A quote about the prairie showing it holds a different set of societal rules to Fitzgerald’s New York

“I had the feeling the world was left behind, that we were outside man’s jurisdiction”

A quote representing the wild unforgiving nature of the prairie and tying into ideals of manifest destiny.

“Not a country, but the material out of which countries are made.”

A quote about Antonia's strength that simultaneously represents the hardship faced by the working woman

“She was there in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished.”

A quote about the patriarchal, socially conservative nature of Black Hawk

“The country girls were considered a menace to social order”

A quote relating the setting to the allure of Manifest Destiny

“The whole country seemed, somehow, to be running”

A quote representing Jim’s fears about Antonia

“I did not wish to find her aged and broken”

A quote representing Mr Shimerda’s difficulty adjusting to prairie life

“Mr Shimerda had not been rich and selfish, he had only been so unhappy that he couldn't live any longer”

A quote showing Antonia's understanding of the inequality she faces at a young age

“Things will be easy for you. But they will be hard for us”

A representation of Black Hawk’s view of immigrants

“People who don't like this country ought to stay home”

A quote representing Antonia’s mother

“Even the mother was offering me things, but I knew she expected substantial gifts in return”

A quote representing Jim and Antonia’s relationship

“The idea of you is a part of my mind”

A quote containing the title of the book

“She was still My Antonia!”