How we cite our quotes: (Name of Play, Act #)
Quote #1
One is struck at once by the strange impression [her face] gives in repose of not living flesh but a wonderfully life-like pale mask, in which only the deep-set eyes, of a dark violet blue, are alive. (Homecoming, Act 1)
Above all, one is struck by the same strange, life-like mask impression her face gives in repose. (Homecoming, Act 1)
One is struck at once by the peculiar quality his face in repose has of being a lifelike mask rather than living flesh. (Homecoming, Act 1)
His face is handsome in a stern, aloof fashion. It is cold and emotionless and has the same strange semblance of a life-like mask that we have already seen in the faces of his wife and daughter and Brant. (Homecoming, Act 2)
There is the same lifelike mask quality of his face in repose. (The Hunted, Act 1)
OK, OK, we get it. The playwright's almost identical descriptions here (respectively) of Christine, Lavinia, Brant, and Ezra, and Orin tells us what's happened to the emotional life in this family. These descriptions, even without the action of the play, set the mood of doom and gloom. It's a picture of faces in a casket. Real death, when it comes, isn't gonna be much of a change for these folks.
Quote #2
LAVINIA: I couldn't very well consult you when Seth asked me. You had gone to New York—to see Grandfather. Is he feeling any better? He seems to have been sick so much this past year.
CHRISTINE: Yes. He's much better now. […] I've been out to the greenhouse to pick these. I felt our tomb needed a little brightening. Each time I come back after being away it appears more like a sepulcher! The "whited" one of the Bible—pagan temple front stuck like a mask on Puritan gray ugliness. […] (Homecoming, Act 1)
A tomb's an appropriate metaphor for the Mannon home. What belongs in a tomb? Dead people. It sounds to us like Christine is implying that everybody in that house is already dead—maybe not physically, but emotionally. More than a few Mannons are going to be actually dead by the end of the trilogy.
Quote #3
MANNON: I've got to leave for a few days. Then I must go back and disband my brigade. Peace ought to be signed soon. The President's assassination is a frightful calamity. But it can't change the course of events.
LAVINIA: Poor man! It's dreadful that he should die just at his moment of victory.
MANNON: Yes! All victory ends in the defeat of death, that's sure. But does defeat end in the victory of death? That's what I wonder! (Homecoming, Act 3)
Ezra himself is about to be "assassinated." His philosophical musings about death are foreshadowing his own.