More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men—to feel whether this time the men would break. The women studied the men’s faces secretly, for the corn could go, as long as something else remained.
“Didn’ you see the No Riders sticker on the win’shield?” “Sure—I seen it. But sometimes a guy’ll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker.”
‘The hell with it! There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.’
I love people so much I’m fit to bust, sometimes.’ An’ I says, ‘Don’t you love Jesus?’ Well, I thought an’ thought, an’ finally I says, ‘No, I don’t know nobody name’ Jesus. I know a bunch of stories, but I only love people. An’ sometimes I love ’em fit to bust, an’ I want to make ’em happy, so I been preachin’ somepin I thought would make ’em happy.’
“Fella can get so he misses the noise of a saw mill.”
all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.
We can’t depend on it. The bank—the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.
If all the neighbors weren’t the same, we’d be ashamed to go to meeting.
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 a paper with numbers on it.
The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.
The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat.
when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.
“But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don’t aim to starve to death before I kill the man that’s starving me.”
There’s some way to stop this. It’s not like lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.”
didn’t get enough crop to plug up an ant’s ass.
An’ there’s the place down by the barn where Pa got gored to death by a bull. An’ his blood is right in that groun’, right now. Mus’ be. Nobody never washed it out. An’ I put my han’ on that groun’ where my own pa’s blood is part of it.”
They got to live before they can afford to die.”
“Here’s for the preacher,” he said. “I tol’ you I ain’t no preacher.” “Well, here’s for the man, then.”
“Yes, you should talk,” he said. “Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin’ man can talk the murder right out of his mouth an’ not do no murder. You done right. Don’t you kill nobody if you can help it.”
it all just amounts to what you tell yourself.”
“Don’t do it,” Casy whispered. “It won’t do no good. Jus’ a waste. We got to get thinkin’ about doin’ stuff that means somepin.”
Just walks aroun’ like he don’t see nothin’, an’ he prays some. Took ’im two years to come out of it, an’ then he ain’t the same. Sort of wild. Made a damn nuisance of hisself. Ever’ time one of us kids got worms or a gutache Uncle John brings a doctor out. Pa finally tol’ him he got to stop. Kids all the time gettin’ a gutache. He figures it’s his fault his woman died. Funny fella. He’s all the time makin’ it up to somebody—givin’ kids stuff, droppin’ a sack a meal on somebody’s porch. Give away about ever’thing he got, an’ still he ain’t very happy.
He had never been angry in his life. He looked in wonder at angry people, wonder and uneasiness, as normal people look at the insane.
He lived in a strange silent house and looked out of it through calm eyes. He was a stranger to all the world, but he was not lonely.
She watched him as though he were suddenly a spirit, not human any more, a voice out of the ground.
Oh, take ’em! Take ’em quick, mister. You’re buying a little girl plaiting the forelocks, taking off her hair ribbon to make bows, standing back, head cocked, rubbing the soft noses with her cheek. You’re buying years of work, toil in the sun; you’re buying a sorrow that can’t talk.
We could have saved you, but you cut us down, and soon you will be cut down and there’ll be none of us to save you.
The bitterness we sold to the junk man—he got it all right, but we have it still. And when the owner men told us to go, that’s us; and when the tractor hit the house, that’s us until we’re dead.
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it.
They sat and looked at it and burned it into their memories. How’ll it be not to know what land’s outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and know—and know the willow tree’s not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can’t. The willow tree is you. The pain on that mattress there—that dreadful pain—that’s you.
I’m scared of stuff so nice. I ain’t got faith. I’m scared somepin ain’t so nice about it.”
Ma, stop your worryin’. I’m a-gonna tell you somepin about bein’ in the pen. You can’t go thinkin’ when you’re gonna be out. You’d go nuts. You got to think about that day, an’ then the nex’ day, about the ball game Sat’dy. That’s what you got to do. Ol’ timers does that. A new young fella gets buttin’ his head on the cell door. He’s thinkin’ how long it’s gonna be. Whyn’t you do that? Jus’ take ever’ day.”
they had gone against a system they did not understand and it had beaten them.
“It’s all work,” the preacher replied. “They’s too much of it to split it up to men’s or women’s work.
the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation.
nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.
It’s a free country. Well, try to get some freedom to do. Fella says you’re jus’ as free as you got jack to pay for it.
“Ain’t you thinkin’ what’s it gonna be like when we get there? Ain’t you scared it won’t be nice like we thought?” “No,” she said quickly. “No, I ain’t. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. It’s too much—livin’ too many lives. Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ’em, it’s too much. You got to live ahead ’cause you’re so young, but—it’s jus’ the road goin’ by for me. An’ it’s jus’ how soon they gonna wanta eat some more pork bones.” Her face tightened. “That’s all I can do. I can’t do no more. All the rest’d get upset if I
...more
two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one.
This is the beginning—from “I” to “we.”
the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “we.”
little worried men, reassure themselves that business is noble and not the curious ritualized thievery they know it is; that business men are intelligent in spite of the records of their stupidity; that they are kind and charitable in spite of the principles of sound business; that their lives are rich instead of the thin tiresome routines they know; and that a time is coming when they will not be afraid any more.
Christ, one person with their mind made up can shove a lot of folks aroun’!
goddamn it, Al, don’ keep ya guard up when nobody ain’t sparrin’ with ya. You gonna be all right.”
“Well, we all got to make a livin’.” “Yeah,” Tom said. “On’y I wisht they was some way to make her ’thout takin’ her away from somebody else.”
And the circle sang. He wailed the song, “I’m Leaving Old Texas,” that eerie song that was sung before the Spaniards came, only the words were Indian then.
“If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it ’cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he’s poor in hisself, there ain’t no million acres gonna make him feel rich,
“It don’t take no nerve to do somepin when there ain’t nothin’ else you can do.
“I ain’t never done nothin’ that wasn’t part sin,”
How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare him—he has known a fear beyond every other.
