Select five of the following eight quotes, list the title of…
Select five of the following eight quotes, list the title of work (1pt.) and author (1 pt.), then discuss (1-2 sentences, 2 pts.) the significance of this passage. Write your answers in the space provided below. Do not save your answer until you have completed all five answers. Make sure you number your answers so that I can tell which quote you are working with. (4 pts. each) 1. “We rang the doorbell, and the door was opened by a girl. I could not have told you how old she was, which was one of the things about girls I had begun to hate: when you start out as kids you’re just boys and girls, going through time at the same speed, and you’re all five, or seven, or eleven, together. And then one day there’s a lurch and the girls just sort of sprint off into the future ahead of you, and they know all about everything… ” 2. [She] “came to know the wretched life of the poor. Yet she played her part heroically, without faltering. The terrible debt had to be paid. She would pay it.” 3. “I looked at her hard. She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and it gave her face a kind of dopey, hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of her skirt. She looked at her sister with something like fear but she wasn’t mad at her. This was Maggie’s portion. This was the way she knew God to work.” 4. “But she sat down to rest. She spread her skirts on the bank around her and folded her hands over her knees. Up above her was a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe. She did not dare to close her eyes, and when a little boy brought her a plate with a slice of marble-cake on it she spoke to him. ‘That would be acceptable,’ she said. But when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air.” 5. “Looking back in the big window, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.” 6. “There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the colors that filled the air . . .When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: ‘free, free, free!'” 7. “then he laughed and lifted his gun and pointed it at Pheonix. She stood straight and faced him. ‘Doesn’t the gun scare you?’ he said, still pointing it. ‘No, sir. I seen plenty go off closer by, in my day, and for less than what I done,’ she said, still holding utterly still.” 8. [He] “gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was buried with Martha under the white sands at the Jersey shore. They were pressed together, and the pebble in his mouth was her tongue. He was smiling. Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was, the sullen patties, yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of security. He was beyond that. He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn’t help it.”
Read Details