How we cite our quotes: (Story.Section.Paragraph) or (Story.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I've sung it and sung it, and I'm making forty thousand dollars a day offa it, and you know what, I don't have the faintest notion what the song means. (Nineteen Fifty-Five.41)
Traynor can't wrap his mind around Gracie Mae's song, even though he's been performing it all over the world. As a result, his success is bittersweet: he has the money and the fame, but his inability to understand the song (not to mention his inability to write from his own experience) leaves him empty inside.
Quote #2
I married but it never went like it was supposed to. I never could squeeze any of my own life either into it or out of it. It was like singing somebody else's record. I copied the way it was sposed to be exactly but I never had a clue what marriage meant. (Nineteen Fifty-Five.92)
Traynor continues to fail at the emotional side of life. He can't put his experiences into words to write his own songs, and he can't seem to make a love connection that will fulfill him. It's this sense of isolation, Gracie Mae thinks, that leads to his "trouble" and early death.
Quote #3
He had been rambling on about himself for over an hour and she had at first respectfully listened because she was the kind of person whose adult behavior—in a situation like this—reflected her childhood instruction; and she was instructed as a child, to be polite. (Lover.2)
The narrator of "The Lover" has had to endure all kinds of boring conversations with self-absorbed poets. Once again, she finds herself cornered by a pompous windbag at the writer's colony where she's gone to have some personal time away from family. She's willing to throw aside her hatred of windbags when she meets Ellis—who also drones on about himself—because he's going to help her fulfill her dream of taking a lover.