Modernist form in the relation between the nameless mass experience and the individual narrative. The two interact and effect each other.
"all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement" (14) movement is inherent in them, the initial motive moment of force
"And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of the hated the mathematics that drove them...the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling...machines and masters all at the same time" (32).
"those creature don't breathe air, don't eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money" (32)
"When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size" (32).
"Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not paper with numbers on it" (33).
"The bank isn't like a man...only made of me...the bank is something else than men...Men made it, but they can't control it" (33).
"Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me" (38).
"Maybe the thing isn't men at all. maybe, like you said, the property's doing it" (38).
"ol' graveyard ghos'" (52)
"it's a thing that started way the hell an' gone back, an' nobody seems to be able to stop her, an' nobody got sense enough to change her. He says for God's sake don't read about her because he says for one thing you'll jus' get messed up worse, an' for another you won't have no respect for the guys that work the gover'ments" (55).
"And some day—the armies of bitterness will all be going the same way" (88)
"Gonna cuss an' swear an' hear the poetry of folks talkin'. All that's holy, all that's what I didn' understan'. All them things is the good things" (94)
"The people too were changed in the evening, quieted. They seemed to be a part of an organization of the unconscious" (99).
"She tool a letter from an envelope and dropped the trinkets in the envelope...and laid the box gently among the coals" (108).
"Well, California's a big State. / It ain't that big. The whole United States ain't that big. It ain't that big. It ain't big enough. There ain't room enough for you an' me, for your kind an' my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men...Ever hear of the border patro on the California line?...Well, try to get some freedom to do. Fella says you're jus' as free as you got jack to pay for it" (120).
"He had become the soul of the car" (123).
"Seems to me we don't never come to nothin'. Always on the way. Always goin' and goin'...They's movement now. People moving. We know why, an' we know how. Movin' 'cause they got to" (128).
"You ain't askin' nothin'; you're jus' singin' a kinda song" (128).
"The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution...Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here 'I lost my land' is cahnged; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—'We lost our land.' The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one" (151).
"For the quality of owning freezes you forever into 'I,' and cuts you off forever from the 'we.' (152)
"the highway became their home and movement their medium of expression" (163)
"Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus. / At first the families were timid in the building and tumbling worlds, but gradually the technique of building worlds became their technique" (194)
Of CA: "She's a nice country. But she was stole a long time ago" (205).
"ever'thing in California is owned...they ain't even nice to each other...Got a million acres an' scairt of dyin'...Guess he's crazy. Mus' be crazy...He looks crazy. Crazy an' mean" (207).
221: Dehumanizing
"repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed" (238)
"Thy're scairt we'll organize, I guess. An' maybe they're right. This here camp is a organization. People there look out for theirselves. Got the nicest strang band in these parts. Got a little charge account in the store for folks that's hungry" (297).
321 Human made inhuman
"There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success" The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, ad the ripe fruit. And child dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food much rot, must be forced to rot" (349).
"You don' know what you're a-doin'." (386) the crucial destructive violence of the book, people killing each other without knowing why, without specificity.
The speech: 419
"They wored jerkily, like machines" (441)
"There ain't no baby. They never was no baby. We was wrong" (446)
Breast feeding: 455
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