Mary Antin Quotes

Mary Antin shares straightforward, nostalgic observations about how familiar places blend together.

17 quotes

Outside America I should hardly be believed if I told how simply, in my experience, Dover Street merged into the Back Bay.

#1
It is painful to be consciously of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness. I am not afraid to live on and on, if only I do not have to remember too much. A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

#2
A little instruction in the elements of chartography-a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map-would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost.

#3
A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yesterdays; for to-day and to-morrow are here, with their impatient tasks. The world is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs masterpieces.

#4
Encyclopaedia Brittanica's Guide to Women

#5
What we get in steerage is not the refuse, but the sinew and bone of all the nations.
On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five rubles.
A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession.
One current of continuity runs underneath all the abortive phases of my life. From childhood on I have been obliged to drop anything I was doing to run after any man who seemed to know a little more than I did about God . . . I most want to write about: how a modern woman has sought the face of God-not the name nor the fame but the face [ital] of God-and what adventures came to meet her on this ancient human path.
The past was only my cradle, and now it cannot hold me, because I am grown too big.
It is not that I belong to the past, but the past that belongs to me.
The first meal was an object lesson of much variety. My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them.
There was one public school for boys, and one for girls, but Jewish children were admitted in limited numbers - only ten to a hundred; and even the lucky ones had their troubles.
You went up to be examined with the other Jewish children, your heart heavy about that matter of your nose.
We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.
No, the czar did not want us in the schools.
As we moved along in a little procession, I was delighted with the illumination of the streets. So many lamps, and they burned until morning, my father said, and so people did not need to carry lanterns.