Today I’m going to do something a little bit different. In the past three stories I read, I focused on the authors’ writing styles and the poignancy of their prose and ended up underlining a lot of different quotes. I’ve always been the type of person that slathers my books in sticky notes, marking lines that stand out to me. I have a long word document on my computer with all of the ones I’ve saved, and every so often I look through them see what I thought was important or worth remembering.
But lately, I’ve been thinking about what makes a quote…well, quotable. It’s all subjective, of course – every reader interprets every story differently. Certain sentences have entirely different meanings to different people despite the words being the same. However, many quotes have been widely recognized as “good quotes” – and even if you haven’t read the book they came from, you’ve likely heard of them before:
“Not all those who wander are lost” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”- Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
But what makes some quotes stand out on the page more than others – what is it about them that merits a sticky note, a dog ear, an underlining?
Continuing through The Penguin Book of Contemporary Canadian Women’s Short Stories, I’m going to discuss some of the quotes I marked in the last three stories I read and discuss how they affected me.
“Play the Monster Blind” by Lynn Coady
Lynn Coady is a writer and journalist from Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia, and the 2013 winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize for her short story collection Hellgoing.
In “Play the Monster Blind,” a woman named Bethany is spending time with her fiancée John’s family as they travel from cottage to cottage, eating, drinking, swimming and listening to their alcoholic father’s stories about his boxing days. The siblings spend much of their time roughhousing, which eventually results in Bethany getting an elbow to the face, while they try to ignore their father’s drunken antics.
A major topic in this story is weight. John is described as big – overweight in his youth, but now just naturally large. His brother is described as wiry while his sister has struggled with anorexia, while the father and uncle are heavily overweight.
Here’s a quote that made me laugh:
“…the plastic chairs sagged and quivered from the weight of men. The father built all of hard, stubborn fat, but John was just big. They sat quietly torturing their lawn chairs together” (Coady 43).
Of course, the picture of two men on the brink of breaking their lawn chairs is inherently amusing, but what makes this quote effective is how it both brings a specific image into the reader’s head and also provides a succinct comparison of John and his father. It’s not only the humour that makes this quote stand out, but how it’s constructed. Coady doesn’t just say the chairs looked like they might break; she describes the men’s effects on them. She leads the reader in and then distinguishes the two men from one another, comparing and contrasting them in a simple but satisfying way.
Bethany begins comparing herself to John’s sister, and her self-consciousness is effectively represented in the imagery of the natural landscape around her:
“The ever-present ocean was nowhere in sight, and it disoriented her. She didn’t know if this was beautiful or not. The green mounds sloped upward uninsistently, and then came together in dark, obscene valleys that reminded her of the creases in a woman’s flesh – her own. Reminded her of sitting naked and looking down at the spot where her stomach protruded slightly over her thighs. She didn’t like how these low mountains were everywhere, their dark rolling motion completely uninterrupted by a view of water, or patches of field” (Coady 58).
All right, so this is a passage, not a single quote, but I didn’t want to cheat you out of any line. Bethany feels she has lost control of her body, and, like nature, her skin has taken on a form of its own without her intervention. She feels uncertain about the landscape and whether it is beautiful or not – just as she feels uncertain as to whether or not to accept her body, and whether or not John is bothered by her weight (which he later mentions he is not). She sees her stomach rolls in the low mountains and is bothered by the lack of variety in the view and how she can’t see anything past them.
The comparison is obvious, but still elegantly formed. Coady doesn’t just say that the mountains remind Bethany of her stomach rolls – instead, she intertwines the imagery with Bethany’s thought process, taking the reader through the landscape and also through Bethany’s insecurities. It’s beautifully written with strong imagery and storytelling.
Of course, the line that connects to the story’s title must be included here, when the comparison is made to the drunken father and Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein:
“On the path to the cabin, they saw the father coming towards them. The sun had set moment’s before and their eyes were used to the dark, but the father’s weren’t. They saw him first, walking with great clomps, his arms stretched out in front of him like Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein” (Coady 64).
Bethany then proceeds to describe how the monster was originally going to be blind, which is why he walks with his arms out on the film. This quote is great because it evokes suspense and fear in the reader that the father’s alcoholism is about to come to a boiling point and things are going to turn violent, when really, it is the siblings’ tipsy tomfoolery that ends up causing injuries.
The comparison of the father to the monster – is a powerful way to describe his anger issues and alcoholism. His drinking makes him monstrous – like when he snaps at the waitress at the restaurant and makes her cry – and his behaviour is unpredictable. John and Bethany recognize the father’s problems but cannot clearly discern what he will do next. The blindness really comes from the father’s children who are trying to ignore their father’s issues and carry on drinking; John is the only one who tries to acknowledge it head-on. That’s what makes this quote important and unique.
“Reunion” by Libby Creelman
Libby Creelman was actually born in Massachusetts but lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland. She has published a short story collection and two novels.
This story about a woman named Yvonne who attends her high school reunion with two old friends. She immediately regrets going, feeling detached from everyone there and not even recognizing a man, Teddy Lawson, who fingered her derrière in the fifth grade. She reflects on how the men have aged less gracefully than the women, and then discovers that Teddy was ‘sweet on her’ when they were younger. Yvonne reveals that she is divorced and that her five-year-old son, Rudy, had meningitis and is now deaf.
Yvonne is struggling with life right now, and the high school reunion reminds her of how life goes on in strange and unpredictable ways, how everyone’s lives and turned out differently and everyone has faced different problems over the years.
Yvonne’s negative association with Teddy (which is completely justified, considering the fingering incident) combined with her drunkenness, brings out her anger and frustration:
“I listened as he summarized his life, and gradually began to hate him and direct towards him all of my anger of the past three years. I blamed him for everything, knowing he was not to blame” (Creelman 74).
Anger comes takes many different forms. For Yvonne, she has internalized her grief over her son’s condition, but being back in her old high school with someone she detests is what triggers her confession of how she is really doing. She cannot control her son’s health, like she could not control Teddy’s actions or his former feelings towards her. Her lack of control makes her feel powerless, so all she can do is indulge in her emotions.
She later realizes that:
“The people we had become bore traces of the children we had been, but these traces were negligible – almost ornamental. Sometimes Rudy looked up at me from his chair and for a moment I caught just that: a curious, ghostly trace of the baby he had been” (Creelman 76).
Our past selves stay with us, even after we’ve grown and changed and matured. This is what Yvonne takes away from the reunion, and this quote summarizes her feelings in a poignant, powerful way. Its meaning is pretty explicit, but it is still articulated effectively and makes the reader better understand her thoughts about her son and empathize for her.
“An Apology” by Ramona Dearing
Ramona Dearing is a successful writer from St. John’s, Newfoundland who also works at CBC as a reporter, host and producer. Her first book, So Beautiful, was published in 2004.
“An Apology” tells the story of a man, Gerard, who is on trial in Newfoundland for sexually abusing boys at an orphanage run by clergymen. He is in complete denial of the allegations against him, despite the number of boys – now men – standing against him, and the clear disgust the jury has of him. Gerard dismisses the men as mentally ill, low-life alcoholics, and insists he taught discipline at the orphanage and should not be held responsible for their problems. He is constantly thinking of his puppy, Brigus, who he had to leave back in Ontario, that is in the care of a young woman who eventually hears about the trial and becomes mistrusting of Gerard and threatens over the phone to take the dog with her. In the end, when Gerard realizes he will be found guilty, he phones the girl and tells her to take the dog. The story ends with his phone ringing with news of the judge’s verdict.
Gerard’s perspective is unsettling but is also a powerful way to tell this kind of story in a different form. He consistently refutes the men’s testimonies of him in his mind:
“They’ve got something else in common: they’ve disappointed anyone who ever came into their lives. Including Gerard” (Dearing 81).
This quote summarizes Gerard’s opinions of the men and shows how guiltless he feels. It is evident he abused them when they were children but in his frame of mind, they are the ones at fault. His psychology is fascinating to example, particularly in these snippets of his thinking. What makes this quote so potent is its shock-value; Gerard explicitly blaming the men, putting them in a box and separating himself completely from their situations. If he had rambled on and on about how he is innocent and how the trial is unfair, the story wouldn’t have the same effect. Gerard’s thoughts are sudden punches to the reader’s gut, and that’s what makes this story so good and so disturbing.
In my next post, I’m going to talk about leads and their effect on enticing the reader and setting the tone for the rest of the story, so look for that in the next few days.
Please share some of your favourite quotes and what effect they’ve had on you and your interpretations of texts!