How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
They'd put an awning up over the gravesite but the weather was all sideways and it did no good. The canvas rattled and flapped and the preacher's words were lost in the wind. (17)
What do you make of the fact that the words for John's dead grandfather get drowned out by the weather? If this was an episode of "Man vs. Wild," and the wind was the "Wild," who would be winning here?
Quote #2
What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise. (21)
What's the connection between blood, men, and horses? What does it mean that they are connected in this way?
Quote #3
His father rode sitting forward slightly in the saddle, holding the reins in one hand about two inches above the saddlehorn. So thin and frail, lost in his clothes. Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he'd seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be. (242)
John's father seems scarred by his experiences in World War II, and it affects how he sees the land about. What could it mean to "see [the country] right" in this instance? What connections can you make between land and mental state in the novel's early going?
Quote #4
Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world. (973)
The simile linking lightning and machinery suggests that the natural world isn't just there, but has its own reactions and processes, not so different from our own mechanical creations, which we can only glimpse dimly.
Quote #5
They pulled the wet saddles off the horses and hobbled them and walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever before […] something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool. (1029)
How would you break down the closing simile in this passage—what kind of image does it create to compare landscape, grace, and a gorgon (or medusa)? How does the gender of medusa and its relationship to landscape impact the meaning?
Quote #6
Before the colt could struggle up John Grady had squatted on its neck and pulled its head up and to one side and was holding the horse by the muzzle with the long bony head pressed against his chest and the hot sweet breath of it flooding up from the dark wells of its nostrils over his face and neck like news from another world. (1584)
John's breaking a wild horse here, and the literal otherworldliness of the animal sets a contrast between tame horses and those who still belong to nature. Despite physical proximity in this passage, and despite John's familiarity with horses, it seems more like an alien encounter.
Quote #7
That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain […] and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses…and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised. (2312)
The unreal unity and tranquility of nature here takes you out of the action of the novel. Immediately after, John wakes up in a prison cell and is led along with Rawlins and Blevins toward Saltillo. There's a stark contrast between a fantastical image of how peaceful the land might be and how the land humans created actually is.
Quote #8
The other man walked behind them carrying the rifle and Blevins disappeared into the ebony trees hobbling on one boot much as they had seen him that morning coming up the arroyo after the rain in that unknown country long ago.
As Blevins is led to his death, how does the landscape mentioned here—both past and present—evoke a mood? How might a morning after the rain look like compared to a line of "ebony trees"? (Think Lord of the Rings here: dark tree things are almost never good.)
Quote #9
The country rolled away to the west through broken light and shadow and the distant summer storms a hundred miles downcountry to where the cordilleras rose and sank in the haze in a frail last shimmering restraint alike of the earth and the eye beholding it. (3333)
This scene is where John is about to ride up to the ranch where he was arrested, and where he hopes to find Alejandra. What could 'restraint' mean here, and how can it be shared by both John (a human) and the land?
Quote #10
In four days' riding he crossed the Pecos at Iraan Texas and rode up out of the river breaks where the pumpjacks in the Yates Field tanged against the skyline rose and dipped like mechanical birds. Like great primitive birds welded up out of iron by hearsay in a land perhaps where such birds once had been. (4050)
Oil fields are compared to big primitive birds in the closing paragraphs, before John rides off into the dusty plains. What do you make of this—is the novel saying anything about the relationship between technology and the land here? Who do you think wins in that comparison? Does anyone?