My Ántonia ALL Flashcards
“I could…”
“I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me as our shadows used to”
“I did…”
“I did not want to find her aged and broken”
“Some memories…”
“Some memories are realities and better than anything that can ever happen to one again”
“Whatever we …”
“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
“Antonia had not…”
“Antonia had not lost the fire of life.”
“I’d have liked…”
“I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister–anything a woman can be to a man.
“If there were …”
“If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry”
“I prefer to…”
“I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.”
“More than any other…”
“More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.”
“Optima…”
“Optima dies … prima fugit. The best days are the first to flee.”
“He sighed and …”
“he sighed and told us that if he had stayed at home in Russia perhaps by this time he would have had a pretty daughter of his own to cook and keep house for him.”
“A girl…”
“A girl like me has got to take her good times when she can.”
“People who…”
“People who don’t like this country ought to stay at home”
“There never were…”
“There never were such people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had.”
“But Mr Shimerda…”
“But Mr Shimerda had not been rich and selfish: he had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer.”
“Ambrosch put …”
“Ambrosch put upon her some chores a girl ought not to do”
“She liked me better…”
“She liked me better from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again. I had killed a big snake – I was now a big fellow.”
“He wanted us to know …”
“He wanted us to know that they were not beggars in the old country; he made good wages, and his family were respected there. “
James Miller
“My Antonia does not portray, in any meaningful sense the fulfilment of the American Dream”
Kelly McCormick
“Each immigrant’s story represents a footprint in the journey of the American Dream”
Yukman
“Mr Shimerda dies a social death before his actual death”
William J Stuckey
“Jim is attracted to Antonia’s warmth and vitality, but at the same time repelled by grosser aspects of her behaviour”
Lambert
“Cather succeeded because she could imagine women achieving identity and defining their own purpose”
James E Miller
“Jim is in search of the American past, his past, in an attempt to determine what went wrong, and perhaps as well what was right, with the dream”
Churchwell
“My Ántonia is one of the earliest novels that is sympathetic towards an unwed mother”
Martin
“[Mr Shimerda’s suicide] is a testimony to the grim reality of the struggle imposed by frontier conditions”
