I hope I get off in a city, a big one. I always wanted to see a city, and you can get jobs there, and people don't ask a lot of questions like they do in a place like the valley
David is looking for a new life and he hopes that he will find a perfect place for living where he will find a good job and then everything will be ok. He wanted to get to a big city where no one knows him and no one asks questions because he didn’t like when someone asks too many questions, it makes him feel uncomfortable. Here we can see a typical person who is running away from problems (literally, because he was on the train when thinking of it); a person who wants to start everything from scratch and naively hopes that a new life depends on a new place of living.
The people from out of the hills were there. You could tell by all the trucks covered with hardened clay that were trying to park along the streets. I thought of how many of those trucks were being driven by women, with most of the men overseas. They drove them pretty well, too, and it made me think of how people can sometimes do things you never would have thought they could
People are extremely talented and strong creatures. They can do almost everything, and our motto is that everything is possible in this world; it just takes a little more time for impossible things. During the war period women in David’s town were doing all the men job because they just didn’t have any other choice, and as David noticed, they did this work pretty good, although it was something new for them. In critical situations people find out that their potential is much bigger than they could expect and they can do things which they used to think they cannot. Our limit is only in our head, we can do more, but it also depends on the situation and current need.
I looked back at the telegram and thought of how funny it was that a few black letters on some yellow paper could make people feel the way it made Mother feel. I thought what it would do if the black letters were just changed around a little to read something else, anything. I wondered where they had Poppa now so far away from home where he should have died. No one I ever knew well died before. This was the first time, and I didn't know how to feel
This quote represents the amusement of the young boy who has just lost his father but he hasn’t realized it yet. He doesn’t know how he should feel and what he has to do or to say. He sees that his mother is terrified, she is in pain because her husband had died and he will never come back home but David has never lost a close person before and this feeling is new for him, he wonders how a little piece of papers with some text on it could change human life in a minute. It was so interesting for him because he has never seen this before. He knew that their life will never be the same and there was no hope for it, their future was unclear for him but he was so lost that he didn’t know how to react on it.
Thinking people feel sorry for you is something I guess you should appreciate, but I didn't and never have. It made me mad to see someone acting like I was pitiful, always asking how I was, fixing special things for me, talking to me in a sort of baby way, making her eyes all sorry-looking when she looked at me
When a person is in trouble other people feel sorry for him and try to cheer him up. But, as it happens, it never helps, all these sorry-looks they just make the matters worse. Everybody appreciate actions but no one really appreciate pity, because it irritates, it makes person feel weak and helpless. David had a big trouble but he didn’t need people to feel sorry for him, he didn’t like when people treated him as if he was a child, especially when Aunt Mae did so, because he believed that she was the person, who knew how to treat him and he was frustrated that her behavior was like that of some stupid people around him.
