How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Chick knew how difficult it was to say no to a little, ragged girl with a sweat-streaked face, lugging a five-gallon pail of berries. [….] It was the way Chick made them do it. It felt like begging. (2.6)
Poverty can totally knock a person's pride, and Polly Ann has felt that sting acutely from her earliest memories. The memory of selling berries at the fancy Armond house to make a little money stays with Polly Ann, and she is determined never to put her children through that indignity.
Quote #2
However, in a few minutes she was back, handing him a done-up package, and the strange thing to him was that she said thank you after taking so much pains to help him. So he thanked her, which seemed more reasonable, and got out of the store as quickly as he could. (11.23)
This quote contrasts what life with money is like and the act of asking for money. From Polly Ann's memory, we see that it's humiliating having to go door-to-door, selling items to scrap together a little cash. But in this scene, Tom is the one doing the buying: he's getting a $2 (more than $50 today!) shirtwaist for his mother for Christmas. It's Tom's first time ever going to a store to buy something, so he's not used to the power shift.
Quote #3
The Hulbert House was the biggest hotel in Boonville, where political visitors or sportsmen on their way into the woods put up. It had always looked very impressive to Tom, with its walls of gray limestone and a six-pillared portico, three stories high, with fancy railed balconies between them at the second and third floors. It had never occurred to Tom to look inside the building. It looked far too costly for a boy like him. But going into it didn't faze Mr. Hook a bit. (23.4)
There's a whole side to life in town that Tom has never experienced because of his family's finances. Mr. Hook's ease in the upscale hotel highlights how different his life is from Tom's.
Quote #4
They spent a few minutes admiring [Mr. Hook's] gray horse, and Tom tried to persuade Birdy to stay to supper, but again he wouldn't. He'd had a fine dinner, but he wanted to get back. Tom knew he was uneasy in front of Mr. Hook and let him go, but he felt sorry as the old man drove off. (29.25)
A nicely dressed Mr. Hook arrives at the Dolan house on Christmas in a nice sleigh pulled by a nice horse. Birdy feels uncomfortable, not just because his things aren't as new and shiny, but also because being from different economic classes can make people feel like they have nothing in common. The next year, however, Tom and Polly Ann are able to convince Birdy to stay, and he and Mr. Hook get along well. That shows that class shouldn't get in the way of friendship, even though it might seem to at first.
Quote #5
Tom thought that made a lot of rollingstock, and he felt mighty insignificant as he walked back across the bridge to talk to Mr. Armond. (34.25)
Is a rollingstock, like, a mix between a rolling chair and a laughingstock? That may be more interesting, but it's old-timey lingo for things like wagons, carriages, and surreys. When Tom first goes to Mr. Armond's, he has to park his old horse and wagon alongside Mr. Armond's fancy-shmancy new rollingstock. It makes Tom feel pretty puny, even though he's there to make an impressive business offer for a boy his age. This is another moment that shows how money can make a person feel super powerful or utterly powerless.
Quote #6
The house and Birdy's small barn were weathered. [….] The shingle roofs were patched here and there, sometimes with newer shingles, sometimes with pieces of tin. The buildings stood between two open fields where Birdy raised just enough crops and mowed just enough hay to keep his animals and himself alive. The critters were like himself—wiry, old, and tough. (36.16)
Birdy has very little as far as material possessions go. As Tom puts it, "Birdy was hardly better off than the Dolans had been"—before Tom gets the Breen money, of course (54.37). However, Birdy never seems to begrudge his poverty. He knows how to make ends meet, and he seems at peace with his way of life.
Quote #7
"And if Mr. Hook should ask me [to marry him], I'd say no. A person from as poor as we are has no right to marry a wealthy man like him." (41.49)
There's that class card again. While Polly Ann's experience with poverty has given her good qualities like independence and a strong work ethic, she also defines herself by it and lets her poverty determine what is or isn't possible for her. It takes Tom reaching for his dreams for her to realize poverty doesn't have to limit everything.
Quote #8
As near as he could make out, the houses were mere shanties, all of them one-story with one or two rooms, built close to the road. Even though there were quite a lot of them, it seemed a lonely place. On the damp, still night air, he could smell poorly tended privies. It wasn't the kind of place he would ever want to live in. (49.13)
Here, Tom and Polly Ann are driving down the Irish Settlement road, and Polly Ann explains that Irish immigrants came to the area to help build the Black River Canal (a true fact), and after the construction work, couldn't afford decent farmland and fell into poverty. A worse state than Tom's, too—these people don't even have the resources to meet basic hygienic needs (vocab alert: privies were outhouses). Tom never has to experience this dehumanizing level of poverty, but Polly Ann suggests that she did when she says, "I guess they are as poor as us Hannaberrys used to be" (49.14).
Quote #9
Knowing you have money in the bank makes all the difference in how a man feels and thinks, but only somebody like Tom, who had never had anything like that in his life, would know how much the difference amounted to. It wasn't that the work of building the barn up again had changed. He and Birdy worked just as hard. It was the fact that now he could see that certain definite things were going to be in reach in the time ahead. When they were poor, time had to go from one day to the next; the future was a cold gray curtain just ahead and frightening—not because of what might be going to happen beyond, but for what you knew could not happen. (55.1)
With the Breen money in his savings account, Tom no longer has to live his life from one paycheck to the next; he can blow it all at once on a trip to Cancun. He doesn't though—not because Cancun wasn't the tourist destination then that it is now, but because he has longer-term plans for the future in mind. The lesson here: Tom wouldn't appreciate the money and the liberty it brings if he didn't have the perspective he gains from his humble beginnings.
Quote #10
The stove was still there too, but so rusted from rain leaking down, it hardly seemed worth saving. Birdy, though, said they should take it out. You hadn't ought to throw away good iron. And anyway, some poor family would be glad to get hold of it. (59.8)
Waste not, want not, as they say. This takes place when Birdy is removing items that have value before he and Tom burn down the Breen house. Birdy is an expert at seeing the usefulness of stuff most people would send to the dump. And it's not that he's cheap, like someone stuffing ketchup packets into their pockets at a fast food place. Instead, it's another aspect of his knowledge about their world, and Tom benefits from Birdy's resourceful eye several times while building his barn.