Studied by 26 people
"“I thought Roy was…”
“what a man should be.”
“I was subject to fits of feeling myself unworthy..”
“somehow deeply at fault. It didn’t take much to bring this sensation to life, along with the certaintity that everybody except my mother saw through me and did not like what they saw.”
“I couldn’t break my;…”
“sense of being at fault down to its components.”
Trying to get a particular sin out of it..”
“was like fishing a swamp…that you have the whole planet on the other end of the line.”
All my images of myself…”
“as I wished to be were images of myself armed.”
“Because I did not know who I was…”
“any image of myself, no matter how grotesque had power over me.”
“Being so close to so much robust identity…”
“made me feel the poverty of my own, the ludicrous aspect of my costume and props.”
“Among the trees…”
“I achieved absolute vacancy of mind.”
“There was no reason for me to have this feeling…”
“I thought I’d left it back in Florida, together with my fear of fighting and my shyness with girls, but here it was, come to meet me.”
“I sat in other people’s yards and played with their dogs…”
“Their dogs got to know me - by the end of the year they’d be waiting for me.”
“I represented myself to her…”
“as the owner of a palomino horse named Smiley.”
“Roy glowered at her…”
“…and I wrote a letter to Alice.”
“The camouflage coat…”
“made me feel like a sniper.”
“Roy tracked…”
“us down.”
“Once again involved…”
“with Roy, the man she’d left Florida to get away from.”
He would hold no..”
“grudges as long as she walked the line”
“the threats and occasional…
“ brutality with which he held her in place.”
“Even your own kid..”
“knows what you’re up to”
“Roy glowered at me over…”
“over the rifles he was cleaning.”
“Roy was stingy….”
“and slow to take a hint, but I’d put him under siege.”
“emitting one ceaseless note of complaint…”
“that was pitched perfectly to jelly her nerves and bring her to a state where she could agree to anything to make it stop.”
“A girl named Toby….”
“had joined my class before I left Florida, and this had caused both of us scalding humiliation”
“I believed that having his name would…”
“charge me with some of the strength and competence inherent in my idea of him.”
“The odds were good that…”
“I’d never have to share a classroom with a girl named Jack.”
“Never admitting to ourselves…”
“what the real object was: that is, to bring somebody down.”
“Roy was handsome in the conventional way that…”
“appeals to boys. He had a tattoo…he’d been to war…full of heroic implications…He could fix the jeep if he had to.”
“A weapon was the first condition of…”
“self-sufficiency, and of being a real Westerner, and of all acceptable employment”
“I needed that rifle..”
“for itself, and for the way it completed me when I held it.”
“Come here baby…”
“…I’ve got six inches of piping hot flesh just for you….We all said things like that - it was a formality.”
“But the man can give no help…”
“to the boy, not in this matter nor in those that follow. The boy moves always out of reach”
“She and her mother lived…”
“a dream life, in which for days at a time, they played the part of sisters.”
“My mother was pleased…”
“by my father’s show of irritation and stuck up for me.”
“I feared her disapproval…”
“but even more than that I feared her amusement, at what she could not possibly understand.”
“I didn’t to let her in…”
“At the same time, strangely I did.”
We were going to..”
“change our luck.”
“Everything was…”
“going to change when we got out west.”
“People in Utah were…”
“getting up poor in the morning and going to bed rich.”
“She was going to make up for lost time..”
“and I was going to help her.”
(salmon) “They were
already dying”
(beaver) “it's outline somehow suggested"..”
“the shape of the beaver it had consumed.”
"(shoes) Dwight was indignant…”
“he thought I was growing out of malice.”
"(salmon)The change from salt to fresh water…”
“had turned their bodies rotten”
“Daddy left some marks on her…”
“One of them was a strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant breed.”"
“I wrote without heat or hyperbole..”
“in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself.”
“And the boy who lived in their letters,…”
“the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to me I saw, at last, my own face.”
Note 
Flashcard (101)