LITCS 111
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Spring 2016
they none of them seemed to bear any specific kinship to one another; they were just Snopeses, like colonies of rats or termites are just rats and termites.(Gavin on p. 42; ch. 2)
let us then give, relinquish Jefferson to Snopeses, banker mayor aldermen church and all, so that, in defending themselves from Snopeses, Snopeses must of necessity defend and shield us, their vassals and chattels, too.(Gavin, p. 45; ch. 2)
No, we got them now; they're ourn now; I don't know jest what Jefferson could a committed back there whenever it was, to have won this punishment, gained this right, earned this privilege. But we did. So it's for us to cope, to resist; us to endure, and (if we can) to survive.(Ratliff, reporting Gavin's words, on p. 108; ch. 6)
Oh yes, we all said that, all us wits: we would not have missed that chance. Not that we believed it or even disbelieved it, but simply to defend the old Colonel's memory by being first to say aloud among ourselves what we believed the whole Snopes tribe was long since chortling over to one another. […] Not that we really believed that, of course.(Gavin: p. 43; ch. 2)
We've all bought Snopeses here, whether we wanted to or not […] I don't know why we bought them. I mean, why we had to: what coin and when and where we so recklessly and improvidently spent that we had to have Snopeses too.(Gavin, to Eula, p. 101; ch. 5)
What?I [Chick] said.What is it he's got to have?
Respectability,Ratliff said. (270; ch. 16)
This-here new discovery he's jest made,Ratliff said.
Call it civic virtue.(185; ch. 10)
That's right,Ratliff said.
Vice president of that bank aint enough anymore. He's got to be president of it.(271; ch. 16)
at the University at Oxford where there's a thousand extry young fellers […] and nobody a-tall to watch her except a hired dormitory matron that aint got no wife expecting to heir half of one half of Uncle Billy Varner's money.(Ratliff, reported by Chick, p. 271; ch. 16)
[…] that very first day when he [Flem] realised that he himself had nothing and would never have more than nothing unless he wrested it himself from his environment and time, and that the only weapon he would ever have to do it with would be just money.(Gavin on p. 275; ch. 17)
one day, there was a rumored coalition De Spain-Varner-Snopes.(Gavin on 289; ch. 17)
Because the moment she married, the wife who had taken him for her husband for the single reason of providing her unborn child with a name […] would quit him too, either with her present lover or without; in any case, with her father's will drawn eighteen years before she married Flem Snopes and ten or twelve before she ever heard of him, still unchanged.(Gavin on 299; ch. 17)
Why [did Flem send Eula to Oxford]? It's obvious. Why did he ever do any of the things he did? Because he got something in return more valuable to him that what he gave.(Gavin on 304; ch. 17)
So I druv him by Frenchman's Bend. And we had the conversation too, provided you can call the monologue you have with Flem Snopes a conversation. But you keep on trying. It's because you hope to learn. You know silence is valuable because it must be, there's so little of it. So each time you think Here's my chance to find out how a expert uses it. Of course you wont this time and never will the next neither, that's how come he's a expert. But you can always hope you will.(Ratliff on p. 311; ch. 18)
Not catching his wife with Manfred de Spain yet is like that twenty-dollar gold piece pinned to your undershirt.(Ratliff, repeated by Chick, p. 30; ch. 1)
Get up from there. Flem has finally caught Eula, or says he has. He hasn't filed the suit yet so you will have time before the word gets all over the county. I dont know what he's after, but you go in there and stop it. I wont have it. We had enough trouble with Eula twenty years ago. I aint going to have her back in my house worrying me now.(Gavin, speculating on Eula's mother's speech to Billy Varner, on p. 307; ch. 17)
It was like we had had something in Jefferson for eighteen years and whether it had been right or whether it had been wrong to begin with didn't matter anymore now because it was ours, we had lived with it and now it didn't even show a scar, like the nail driven into the tree years ago that violated and outraged and anguished the tree […] until in time the nail disappears. It don't go away; it just stops being so glaring in sight, barked over; there is a lump, a bump of course, but after a while the other trees forgive that and everything else accepts that tree and that bump too until one day the saw or the axe goes into it and hits that old nail.(Chick, p. 318; ch. 19)
[…] that whole afternoon while old Mr Varner still stayed hidden or anyway invisible in Mr Snopes's house.(Chick, p. 323; ch. 19)
(Reported by Gavin on 328; ch. 20)So he caught them.Now he [Mr Garraway] was trembling, shaking, standing there behind the worn counter which he had inherited from his father, racked with tins of meat and spools of thread and combs and needles and bottles of cooking extract and malaria tonic and female compound some of which he had probably inherited too, saying in a shaking voice:Not the husband! The father himself had to come in and catch them after eighteen years!
Linda's will. Giving her share of whatever she would inherit from me, to her – him.(Eula, repeated by Gavin, on p. 336; ch. 20)
Papa didn't know about Manfred until this morning. That is, he acted like he didn't. I think Mamma knew. I think she has known all the time. But maybe she didn't. […] But I don't think Papa knew. He's like you. I mean, you can do that too.
Do what?I [Gavin] said.
Be able to not have to believe something just because it might be so or somebody says it is so or maybe even it is so.(Eula on p. 345; ch. 20)
[...] not once had she ever called me even Mister Stevens. Now she said Gavin.
Marry her, Gavin.
Change her name by marriage, then she won't miss the one she will lose when you abandon her.
Marry her, Gavin.(Eula, on Linda, p. 348; ch. 20)
I dont believe you!I [Gavin] said, cried, or thought I did. But only thought it, until I said:So there's nothing I can do.
Yes,she said. And now she was watching me, the cigarette motionless, not even seeming to burn.Marry her.(Eula, on Linda, p. 237; ch. 15)
and now they could even forgive themselves for condoning adultery by forgiving it, by reminding themselves (one another too I reckon) that if she had not been an abomination before God for eighteen years, she wouldn't have reached the point where she would have to choose death in order to leave her child a mere suicide for a mother instead of a whore.(Chick on pp. 356-7; ch. 21)
Why? Why did she have to? Why did she? The waste. The terrible waste. To waste all that, when it was not hers to waste, not hers to destroy because it was too valuable, belonged to too many, too little of it to waste, destroy, throw away and be no more.He looked at Ratliff.Tell me, V.K. Why?
(Chick on p. 377; ch. 24)Maybe she was bored,Ratliff said.
This is what Ratliff said happened up to where Uncle Gavin could see it.(Chick Mallison on p. 241; opening of ch. 16)
The second premise was much better. If I was not to have her, then Flem Snopes shall never have.(Gavin Stevens on p. 143; ch. 8)
[…] because yes, oh yes, I knew now: Snopes himself was impotent.(Gavin on 100; ch. 5)
You mean that. That doesn't matter. That's never been any trouble. He … can't. he's – what's the word? impotent. He's always been.(Gavin, repeating Eula's words, on p. 347; ch. 20)
No no, no no, no no. He was wrong. He's a lawyer, and to a lawyer, if it aint complicated it dont matter whether it works or not.(Ratliff, on Gavin's explanation, on p. 310; ch. 18)
Because he missed it. He missed it completely.(Ratliff on p. 161; ch. 9)
And still he missed it, even set – sitting right there in his own office and actively watching Flem rid Jefferson of Montgomery Ward. And still I couldn't tell him.(Ratliff on p. 186; ch. 11)
But something you dont want to hear is something you had done already made up your mind against, whether you knowed – knew it or not. […] So I got to wait. I got to wait for him to learn it his – himself, the hard way, the sure way, the only sure way.(Ratliff, discussing Gavin with Chick, on pp. 269-70; ch. 16)
I would have to be a lot older than twelve before I realised that that wreath was not the myrtle of grief, it was the laurel of victory.(Chick on p. 354; ch. 21)
the onliest one I knows that steady receives. So how is Jefferson going to be steady blessed without me [...]?(256; ch. 16)
the morality of marriage which decreed that a man and a woman cant sleep together without a certificate from the police [...] the economy of marriage which is the production of children. (355; ch. 21)