How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
It got in time so that she believed these stories she made up. Great-Uncle Tom became as real to her as her father, Chick, and a good deal more important in her thoughts. But whether the tales she told made any impression on Tom was hard to say.
He liked just as much the stories she told about herself when she was young. […] (2.2-3)
Even as early as the second chapter, we get an indication that family history will be an important factor in the novel. Polly Ann names Tom after her great-uncle (whom she's heard stories of from her own mother but never met) and she also tells him many stories from her own childhood. Placing these stories so early in the book gives us a clue that characters from the past will have a strong presence in the book, even if they're never physically involved in the story.
Quote #2
She dealt out some more cards. "But there's quite a lot of money here later on. You ain't going to go around like a low-down Dolan any more." (6.24)
The prophecy that Tom gets from the Widow Breen isn't just that he'll get rich. It's that he'll get rich and finally be able to shake his family's past. Tom has inherited poverty from his careless grandfather and deadbeat father. According to the Widow Breen, the future will let him leave that legacy behind. It's like being told you'll hit the lottery way, way in advance.
Quote #3
[Mr. Ackerman] didn't say anything; it didn't seem like a proper time to do so, with the old man rustling around with his thoughts and memories, mumbling to himself something about "a scalawag, that Chick was," half a-grin. (8.32)
When Tom goes to get a job at the mill, Mr. Ackerman asks who his father and grandfather are. Turns out Mr. Ackerman and Chick, Tom's grandfather, were downright chummy back in the day. Tom brings back the memory of the rowdy times Mr. Ackerman used to have with Chick, showing that the past is different depending on your perspective. Tom's gotten used to thinking of Chick as his no-good grandfather, but Mr. Ackerman remembers him as a friend from younger days. Funny how that works out.
Quote #4
"I been in this house nearly my whole life, Tom, and I'm going to stay in it. It seems sort of lonesome to you, I guess. But I've got things to think about. There ain't such a thing as an empty room here any more."
[….]
They sat a while over their cups at the kitchen table. Tom remembered how her yellow cat had sat on the table beside her cup and sipped a little tea when she offered him some. Perhaps that was a thing she remembered there, too; and suddenly to Tom it seemed the cat actually was there. (20.20)
Tom thinks Mrs. Breen must be very lonely in her house all by herself, but Mrs. Breen experiences it very differently. All the rooms are filled with memories, which are as real to her as the present. Is she living too much in the past, or does she have a point?
Quote #5
Sure, I remember your grandpa, Tom. Him and me we used to go bird shooting back in those days. Like as not we had Erlo Ackerman along with us with his old orange-spot setter dog. Erlo was quite a sport till his bottom half widened out on him and he grew his pomposity so big. (28.3)
Like Erlo Ackerman, Billy-Bob Baxter (the speaker here) knew Tom's grandfather. In fact, all three of them used to pal around. Also like Erlo, Billy-Bob thinks fondly of Chick. Though Tom isn't at all like Chick in character, you get the idea that the older men who remember Chick might feel like they're connected to Tom based on their personal history. Tom at least gives them the opportunity to remember times from their past.
Quote #6
They would fell [a tree for a supporting post] right away so it would have plenty of time to season, and Birdy would square it himself. He had his father's broadax, which he had used some in his time. He couldn't do the kind of job his father did, he told Tom diffidently, but he could make it square enough. (31.9)
There's quite a bit of history going into Tom's barn. The barn belonged to Bert Breen; Birdy uses his father's ax for construction on it; Mr. Hook gives Tom tools from his family, too, along with a book his father once owned. Birdy often expresses the idea that passing things (including knowledge) through generations is very valuable. If it's true for barns, it's true for people, too.
Quote #7
Mr. Hook came by Christmas Day as he had the year before, and this time he brought candy for the girls and Polly Ann as well as a set of carpenter's tools for Tom. He said they had belonged to an uncle and they showed they had seen some use. But Birdy Morris said that tools that had been used and kept well were always worth more than brand new ones. (34.2)
Birdy reinforces the idea that good-quality items from the past are better than new ones from the present. He makes this point when he gives Tom the secondhand snowshoes, and he makes it again here: the past had value and substance that's hard to come by in the present. This must be one of Birdy's fave life lessons. And maybe one of the author's, too, since he wrote the book 75 years later, with old-fashioned barns and saws part of the distant past.
Quote #8
They sat down to the platter of cold ham she had sliced off the Christmas roast, with pickles and potato salad, and cider to drink, and went right on talking about fishing trips and horse trades and the old-time hermits who lived way back in the woods with no friends except the garter snakes and toads around their shacks. [….] And Polly Ann's cheeks and eyes were bright. She listened to the men, breaking in now and then with some recollection of something her father, Chick Hannaberry, had told her when she was a little girl. The men listened to her and laughed at some of the things she said. Tom never recalled seeing her look livelier or prettier. (34.4)
The year before this one, Birdy had left the Dolans on Christmas when Mr. Hook showed up. This year, he stays and trades stories with Mr. Hook about the past, which has a way of seeming to erase all the differences between them. It's kind of like if you were trapped in an elevator with a stranger and you found out you'd gone to the same preschool. Presto: awkward situation turns into gab-fest.
Quote #9
Mr. Hook asked how many sisters they had been, and she told him five, until Prinny died. Prinny'd been the prettiest, with hair silver-yellow, like ripe June grass, a baby princess for a fact. Then for a moment she seemed to withdraw from them, her face veiled in memory, and her eyes staring out over the open meadow to the line of trees that marked the swamp. (40.25)
At times, like on Christmas, Polly Ann is able to tell stories about her family with good humor, but for Polly Ann, the past also conjures many painful memories. In this scene, Polly Ann starts off telling Tom, Mr. Hook, and Birdy pleasant memories from her past while they're eating a picnic—but the bad ones seep in, too. You've got to have a bit of both to grow, they seem to be saying.
Quote #10
[Tom] had an idea the way [Polly Ann's] mind was going, recollecting the times she had told about Chick Hannaberry driving into the place with her sisters and herself and how she had to go up on the kitchen porch to the back door with a five-gallon pail of red raspberries, or blackberries, or whatever kind of berry they had been picking—a little girl in a ragged dirty dress and bare legs still showing bloody scratches from the berry vine, looking up when the hired girl fetched Mrs. Armond but not able to say a thing. Well, he thought, glancing sideways at her sitting on the high wagon seat beside him, you'd hardly believe she had ever been that little shabby girl. (63.4)
As important as it is for Tom to overcome his family's past, it may be even more important to Polly Ann because she had to live through the disappointments, frustrations, and hardships put on her by her father and husband. Here's the proof that she's done well.