How we cite our quotes: (Chapter, Paragraph)
Quote #1
It's a trick Ben taught me to help settle my Noise. You close yer eyes and as clearly and calmly as you can you tell yerself who you are, cuz that's what gets lost in all that Noise. (2.4)
So the thing about Noise is that it confuses people, making them feel lost because they can't be alone with their thoughts. Talk about not feeling like an individual. Ben teaches Todd a trick that will help him keep his own self together. It's like a meditation exercise: He has to focus on who he is so that he can keep his own thoughts separate from everyone else's.
Quote #2
Cuz you can lie in the Noise, even when everyone knows what yer thinking, you can bury stuff under other stuff, you can hide it in plain sight, you just don't think it clearly or you convince yerself that the opposite of what yer hiding is true and then who'se going to be able to pick out from the flood what's real water and what's not going to get you wet? (2.21)
Here's another powerful image of how the Noise makes people feel lost in a shuffle. Because everything is so jumbled together, people can lose their sense of identity, hiding themselves in everybody else's messy thoughts. If they do this, they lie to themselves about who they are, using the chaos of society as an excuse.
Quote #3
It was my ma and pa who raised sheep on the next farm over from Ben and Cillian growing wheat and it was all friendly and nice and the sun never set and men and women sang songs together and lived and loved and never got sick and never never died. (3.42)
Talk about an ideal image. Before things got bad in the New World, men and women lived together and were happy in a world where everyone got along. There wasn't a struggle between the individual and society, and society didn't threaten the individual because everyone was respected.
Quote #4
"Old World's mucky, violent, and crowded," Hildy says, wiping her face with a napkin, "a-splitting right into bits with people a-hating each other and a-killing each other, no one happy till everyone's miserable. Least it was all those years ago." (16.17)
The Old World was a society where the individual couldn't grow, couldn't become happy and free. It became corrupt because people were trying to protect themselves, and this led to killing and hating. When individuals put themselves before the common good, they lose a functional and safe environment.
Quote #5
"The law is for men," Hildy says, her voice staying calm, like we were standing there talking bout the weather. Can't she see how red this man's Noise is getting? Red ain't yer color if you wanna have a chat. "This here pup ain't a man yet."
"Yer numbers don't mean nothing here, boy" Matthew spits. I don't care how many days away ye are." (17.11-12)
Todd is judged not as an individual, but based on where he's from. See the problem with this? Todd is actually innocent of the crimes of Prentisstown—heck, he doesn't even know what the crimes are. But people from other settlements, like Matthew Lyle, want to threaten him and punish him just because of where he's from.
Quote #6
"I didn't do nothing," I say, taking a step backward, trying to keep my Noise from showing the back door behind me.
"Don't matter," Matthew says, walking forward as I step back. "We got a law here in this town."
"I don't have a quarrel with you," I say."But I've got one with ye, boy." (19.6-8)
This shows that society can cause fights between individuals. Todd tries to defend himself and tell Matthew Lyle that he doesn't have a problem with him personally, but Matthew makes his quarrel with Todd's hometown personal, and hates him by association.
Quote #7
"What does that have to do with anything?" she says, "Why would any reasonable church want to be cut off from itself?"
"Ben says that they came to this world for the simpler life, said that there was even a fight in the early days whether to destroy the fission generators." (21.100-101)
Viola asks a decent question: Why would a society (the church) which is meant to draw people together cut itself apart? It's kind of against its own purpose. But when it comes down to survival, Todd argues, people will do what they want to survive. As we can see, putting our individual want for safety about the common good leads to all kinds of division and chaos.
Quote #8
It's all wild, tho. No fences, no field of crops, and no signs of any kind of settlement or people except for the dusty road itself. Which is good in one way but weird in another.
If New World isn't sposed to have been wiped out, where is everybody? (21.52-53)
Todd's used to a world where everything is regulated for everybody, and the idea of untamed land is a totally new thing for him to see. What's the purpose of all this land if people haven't settled it? He's used to living in a society and can't identify what to do when he's alone in nature.
Quote #9
"What did I say before?" I snap back. "Some of us were busy surviving and couldn't learn about subdividing farming." (21.149)
Todd and Viola are arguing about the individual's role in society because their different societies have made them different types of individuals, who value different things. Todd thinks that a person's role is to start working to help support the community right away. Viola's been taught all the theories of how societies work, though, and she's arguing for the importance of education.
Quote #10
After a while, I find myself forgetting all about Wilf and the—the other things I could think about and I'm just lying back on the cart, watching it all go by, individual creachers snuffling around, feeding, bumping each other now and again with their horns, and there's baby ones, too, and old bulls and taller ones and shorter ones and some with scars and some with scruffier fur." (22.79)
The Sea of Things that Todd runs into represents an ideal society where harmony between individuals is a thing that can happen. Notice that when he's describing them wandering around, he mentions them as "individual creachers." Sure, they're animals, not people, but it's symbolic and it reminds Todd that society among all different types is possible.