How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
He watches his daughter, though there's nothing to watch, and thinks these words: "A great-grandmother who isn't their business." He decides this will be their last year for the cemetery and the Day of All Souls. There are too many skeletons down there. People count to long on the oblivion of children. (1.4)
Look, folks: a clue. Keep it in mind when you watch Codi finding the old Nolina gravestones in Chapter 14. Seriously, though, how is your great-grandmother none of your business? Kingsolver uses an interesting trick here when she supplies the line "and thinks these words." She removes Doc's words from context, so we won't know whether it's other people's grandmas that the girls should be avoiding or their own until later on. It's not a cheap authorial sleight of hand, though, because this is exactly what Doc does do with memories and with photographs. By changing context, he changes the meaning of things.
Quote #2
I was a stranger to Grace. I'd stayed away fourteen years and in my gut I believe I was hoping that had changed: I would step off the bus and land smack in the middle of a sense of belonging. Ticker tape, apologies, the luxury of forgiveness, home at last. Grace would turn out to be the yardstick I'd been using to measure all other places, like the mysterious worn out photo that storybook orphans carry from place to place, never realizing till the end that it's really their home.
None of this happened. Grace looks like a language I didn't speak. (2.19-20)
This is our first summary of how terrible Codi feels about her hometown. Basically, she feels that it isn't home. She's always waiting for a sense of belonging to drop in her lap. The irony here is, of course, that Grace kind of thinks it's a language she doesn't speak, too. Specifically, Codi doesn't speak Spanish; she just hasn't revealed that to any of the people who live in Grace, which is kind of shady. So who's shutting out whom, Codi Noline?
Quote #3
"You know what you are, Codi? I don't know if there's a word for it, but it's the opposite of 'homemaker.'"
"I laughed. She was still distressed by my blank walls. "There's a word. Home wrecker. But I'm not one."
"No I don't mean in the sense of home wrecker. I mean in the sense of home ignorer."
"Oh, that way," I said. I was playing dumb. I knew what she meant. [...] What I failed at was the activity people call "nesting." For me, it never seemed like nesting season had arrived yet. Or I wasn't that kind of bird. (8.91-4)
Maybe she's a fighting cock instead. Or a peacock made out of encyclopedias. In any case, note that pretty soon, Codi starts collecting peacock feathers in her little house, something Doc used to prohibit because he was afraid of bird mites. There is symbolism here, friends, symbolism as loud as an alarmed peahen.