How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
A couple of years after his wife died. It was too much to love in the apartment without her, everything reminded him, so when an apartment opened up in the floor above me he moved in. (1.10)
As we eventually learn, Leo's friend Bruno died in 1941, and now exists only in Leo's mind. How can we interpret his creation of a personal history for Bruno—including wife, apartment, cake baking, etc.?
Quote #2
At first my mother kept everything exactly as he left it. [...] Then one day I came home from school and every obvious sign of him was gone. The closets were cleared of his clothes, his shoes were gone from by the door, and out in the street, next to a pile of garbage bags, stood his old chair. I went up to my bedroom and watched it through the window. The wind sent leaves cartwheeling past it on the sidewalk. An old man passed by and sat in it. I went on and fished his sweater out of the trash bin. (2.14)
In its simplest terms, this episode symbolizes Alma's mother's attempt to move on from her initial period of grieving and Alma's unwillingness to abandon her dad to memory. For more on this, check out "Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory."
Quote #3
Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky. My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world. (2.23-24)
Uncle Julian argues that grief does not necessarily have to be a debilitating force—or at least that grieving can be seen in a positive light. Do you think that Alma agrees with this idea? Do you agree?