How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
But my reason for being here embarrasses them, they don't understand it. They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to: Joe never mentions his mother and father, Anna says hers were nothing people and David calls his The Pigs. (2.6)
Apparently, the narrator's peers consider it odd that she would come back to look for her missing father and hadn't "disowned" him. That attitude itself seems odder, no? Since when is disowning your parents is a rite of passage into adulthood?
Quote #2
If he's safe I don't want to see him. There's no point, they never forgave me, they didn't understand the divorce; I don't think they even understood the marriage, which wasn't surprising since I didn't understand it myself. What upset them was the way I did it, so suddenly, and then running off and leaving my husband and child, my attractive full-colour magazine illustrations, suitable for framing. Leaving my child, that was the unpardonable sin; it was no use trying to explain to them why it wasn't really mine. (3.20)
Oomph, drama. It appears that the narrator doesn't exactly have the simplest of relationships with her parents, since they didn't approve of her life choices with respect to the husband or kid. Of course, we later learn that the husband-kid thing didn't happen at all, so we don't really know how much of the truth the parents got and were reacting to.
Quote #3
But I couldn't have brought the child here. I never identified it as mine; I didn't name it before it was born even, the way you're supposed to. It was my husband's, he imposed it on me, all the time it was growing in me I felt like an incubator. (4.6)
The narrator does not have a warm and fuzzy view of the "miracle" of life, envisioning her pregnant self as a kind of incubator and referring to the baby as "it." Of course, her lack of connection with her "child" and pregnancy likely stems from the fact that she never actually carried that pregnancy to term (her memories here are faulty, as we learn later).
Quote #4
It was my brother who made up these moral distinctions, at some point he became obsessed with them, he must have picked them up from the war. There had to be a good kind and a bad kind of everything. (4.33)
The narrator's brother, whom we never meet except in flashbacks, is an interesting counterpoint to the narrator; as a child, she was gentle and interested in drawing bunny rabbits, while he drew pictures of war. Perhaps he is the "evil" to her "good"? In a novel that's obsessed with doubling, his relationship to his sister is interesting.
Quote #5
We begin to climb and my husband catches up with me again, making one of the brief appearances, framed memories he specializes in: crystal clear image enclosed by a blank wall. (5.33)
Early in the book, the narrator's memories of her "ex-husband" intrude frequently on her perceptions of the present. Her failed marriage seems to haunt her in the present, pursuing or "catching" her even when she's off doing, or thinking about, other things.
Quote #6
She said you just had to make an emotional commitment, it was like skiing, you couldn't see in advance what would happen but you had to let go. Let go of what, I wanted to ask her; I was measuring myself against what she was saying. Maybe that was why I failed, because I didn't know what I had to let go of. For me it hadn't been like skiing, it was more like jumping off a cliff. That was the feeling I had all the time I was married; in the air, going down, waiting for the smash at the bottom. (5.40)
The narrator has been asking Anna how she keeps the magic alive with David. Apparently, Anna didn't really have a whole lot of concrete information to give her about how to keep a successful marriage going. This isn't all that surprising, actually, given that we soon learn that Anna and David actually have a pretty crummy marriage.
Quote #7
We reached the first portage at eleven. My feet moved over the rocks and mud, stepping in my own day-old footprints, backtracking; in my brain the filaments, trails reconnected and branched, we killed other people besides Hitler, before my brother went to school and learned about him and the games became war games. Earlier we would play we were animals; our parents were the humans, the enemies who might shoot or catch us, we would hide from them. (18.36)
The narrator returns here to memories of her childhood with her brother, who definitely emerges as a potentially sinister figure. The notion of the two siblings playing war together and treating their parents as enemies makes the "play" aspect of this game seem a little, er, less playful.
Quote #8
"Shut up, she's my wife," David said. His hand clamped down above her elbow. She jerked away, then I saw his arms go around her as if to kiss her and she was in the air, upside down over his shoulder, hair hanging in damp ropes. (16.20)
David's (lack of) charm is in full force here as he's trying to bully his wife into stripping down for the camera. When she won't consent to it, he picks her up and threatens to throw her in the lake if she continues to hold out. Dear narrator, definitely go elsewhere for any and all future marriage advice.
Quote #9
When he saw her next there would be no recantations, no elaborate reconciliation or forgiveness, they were beyond that. Neither of them would mention it, they had reached a balance almost like peace. Our mother and father at the sawhorse behind the cabin, mother holding the tree, white birch, father sawing, sun through the branches lighting their hair, grace. (16.43)
After the incident between David and Anna over the latter's unwillingness to take off her clothes for the camera, the narrator reflects that the storm will pass easily, and nobody will remain mad about it. For some reason, her thoughts here dissolve into an image of her parents standing together. Are we supposed to believe that the "grace" of this image of them together is somehow akin to David and Anna's marriage? We're not so sure about that, but it's an odd juxtaposition for sure.
Quote #10
He did say he loved me though, that part was true; I didn't make it up. It was the night I locked myself in and turned on the water in the bathtub and he cried on the other side of the door. When I gave up and came out he showed me snapshots of his wife and children, his reasons, his stuffed and mounted family, they had names, he said I should be mature. (18.4)
When the jig is finally up and the narrator comes clean about the fact that she was never married or had a baby, we learn a lot more about her "ex-husband": it seems that he was married (to someone else) and had kids with his wife. The narrator is recalling an incident in which the ex tried to get her to be more "mature" about her emotions by showing her pictures of all the people he was cheating on to be there with her. Touching.