How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world. He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time. (3)
This isn't the fun kind of dark that you get at a haunted house or slumber party. Is the "darkness over them all" only about the weather? After going through the whole novel, could this also be metaphorical in some way? What kind of tone does this set?
Quote #2
What the hell reason you got for staying? You think somebody's goin to die and leave you something?
[No.]
That's good. Cause they aint. […]
If I dont go will you go anyways?
John Grady sat up and put his hat on. I'm already gone, he said. (66-8, 72-3)
John is still upset over being denied the inheritance of his ranch, and seems to have made up his mind to leave. Did he have any alternatives? Could you imagine moments in the early section of the novel where he might have gone a different direction?
Quote #3
The old man shaped his mouth how to answer. Finally he said that among men there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men can be understood at all was probably an illusion. (1645)
What could it be about men that makes them unable to be understood the way horses are? Can you relate this to the idea of "man versus the natural world"?
Quote #4
In the morning they climbed down the four flights of steel ladders into the yard and stood among the prisoners for the morning lista. The lista was called by tiers yet it still took over an hour and their names were not called.
I guess we aint here, said Rawlins. (2714-5)
Rawlins and John Grady have officially disappeared in the Saltillo prison from the very start. How does this framing—and Rawlins' blasé reaction—illustrate the boys' attitudes toward overcoming tough situations?
Quote #5
I cannot do what you ask, she said. I love you. But I cannot.
He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave. (3577)
What is this "something" that enters John Grady? Can you see it at work elsewhere in the novel, or is this merely a passing emotion?
Quote #6
He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be extracted for the vision of a single flower. (3789)
Why was John unable to understand Alejandra? How is alienation here related to the cost that it takes to produce something beautiful? Or is this merely a reaction to his loss?
Quote #7
He must have appeared to them some apparition out of the vanished past because he jostled the other with his elbow and they both looked.
Howdy, said John Grady. I wonder if you all could tell me what day this is?
They looked at each other.
It's Thursday, the first one said.
I mean the date.
The man looked at him. He looked at the horses standing behind him. The date? he said.
Yessir.
It's Thanksgiving day, the other man said. (3803-10)
And you thought people treated you weird when you arrive for the holidays. What do the men's nervous reactions—as well as John's question and their response—reveal about where he has been, and what obstacles lay ahead for his re-entry?
Quote #8
You could get on out on the rigs. Pays awful good.
Yeah. I know.
You could stay here at the house.
I think I'm goin to move on.
This is still good country.
Yeah. I know it is. But it aint my country. […]
Where is you country? [Rawlins] said.
I dont know, said John Grady. I dont know where it is. I dont know what happens to country.
(4031-6, 4040-1)
What does John mean when he says "I dont know what happens to country"? Does it just disappear? Or is this more descriptive of his own situation?
Quote #9
They pulled up along the road in front of the little Mexican cemetery and people got out into the road and the pallbearers in their suits of faded black stood at the rear of the hearse and they carried Abuela's casket up through the gate into the cemetery. No one looked at him. […] They buried her and they prayed and they wept and they wailed and then they came back down out of the cemetery into the road helping each other along and weeping and got into the cars and turned one by one on the narrow blacktop and went back the way they'd come. (4046)
There is a striking contrast between John's reaction to Abuela's funeral and the grieving of the relatives, which seems more in line with Alfonsa's statements about the communal nature of grief. Instead of reflecting on the relatives' grief and common bonds, the narrator zooms in on John's thoughts about a world that seems not to care about the dead.
Quote #10
There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come. (4051)
What do you make of this closing scene—will John forever wander in exile, like the writhing bull, or your idealized antihero of choice? Or might the "world to come" offer something more to himself and the horses he leads?