Named source · 1918

My Ántonia Quotes by Willa Cather: Context & Meanings

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Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

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“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

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Jim recognizes that a shared history can remain a lasting bond even when people cannot recover everything that time and separation have taken away.

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My Ántonia, Book V, Chapter III, Project Gutenberg #242. Jim Burden returns to the old road that first carried him and Ántonia into Nebraska and concludes that whatever they missed, they still possess “the precious, the incommunicable past.” The sentence is retrospective fictional narration about shared memory, belonging and time, not a psychological law.

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