How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Like my brother Fred. We used to sleep four in a bed, and he was the only one that ever let me hug him on a cold night" (3.7).
Memories of Fred represent happy recollections of Holly's past. In the midst of her difficult childhood, her brother was a source of safety and security.
Quote #2
I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods (1.1).
These words open the novel and let us know that we'll be spending time in the past. The story is framed around the idea of looking back.
Quote #3
"You take a man that likes to walk, a man like me, a man's been walking in the streets going on ten or twelve years, and all those years he's got his eye out for one person, and nobody's ever her, don't it stand to reason she's not there" (1.32).
Joe Bell desperately wants to recapture the past, to go back to the chapter when Holly was in his life. He spends his days looking for the woman who can carry him back to a different time.
Quote #4
"She's such a goddamn liar, maybe she don't know herself any more" (4.20).
Holly has spent so much time trying to leave behind Lulamae Barnes that it's possible she doesn't really know who she is – Holiday or Lulamae or anything else. This passage reveals Holly's deep desire to erase the past.
Quote #5
"Even though I kept telling him: But Doc, I'm not fourteen any more, and I'm not Lulamae. But the terrible part is (and I realized it while we were standing there) I am. I'm still stealing turkey eggs and running through a brier patch. Only now I call it having the mean reds" (11.5).
Despite her best efforts, Holly can't escape her past. A part of her will always be Lulamae Barnes from Texas.
Quote #6
"He's the only one would ever let me. Let me hug him on cold nights. I saw a place in Mexico. With horses. By the sea" (11.10).
When Holly's ties to the happy parts of her past disappear, it destroys her. Fred was her one constant link to a past she remembered fondly, and his death erases that for her in an instant.
Quote #7
A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet (4.1).
The narrator's present is more exciting now that Holly's a part of it. His past no longer holds the pull it once did.
Quote #8
"She's strictly a girl you'll read where she ends up at the bottom of a bottle of Seconals. I've seen it happen more times than you've got toes" (4.16).
Although this is O.J.'s prediction for Holly's future, it has everything to do with her past. He believes her eventual fate will come as the result of all of her prior, very bad decisions.
Quote #9
So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I've lived (12.5).
The narrator's memories of his last few days with Holly fade into an indefinite picture because he's so sad at the thought of her leaving. He knows she's going to become a part of his past, not a part of his future.
Quote #10
[I] was moving out of the brownstone because it was haunted (19.1).
The narrator can't escape memories of Holly once she has left, and he can't bear to stay in the apartment since it's a constant reminder of her. He has to remove himself from the physical location of his memories in order to move on.