How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
"I could see that you're good at it. Very good." I struggled to find my point, but could come up only with disturbing, disjointed images: a woman in the emergency room on my first night of residency, stabbed eighteen times by her lover. Curty and Glen sitting in the driveway dappled with rooster blood. Hallie in a jeep, hitting a land mine. Those three girls.
"Everything dies, Codi."
"Oh, great. Tell me something I don't know. My mother died when I was a three year old baby!" I had no idea where that came from. I looked out the window and wiped my eyes carefully with my sleeve. But the tears kept coming. For a long time I cried for those three teenage girls who were split apart from above while they picked fruit. For the first time I really believed in my heart it had happened. That someone could look down, aim a sight, pull a trigger. Feel nothing, forget. (16.172-5)
This is basically a summary of this novel's meditation on the theme of violence. Even violence is connected to our capacity for memory and forgetfulness: we forget violence because we don't want to remember painful things.
Quote #5
Loyd seemed at a loss. Finally he said gently, "I mean, animals die. They suffer in nature and they suffer in the barnyard. It's not like people. They weren't meant to live a good life and then go to heaven, or wherever we go."
[...]
"I'm not talking about chicken souls. I don't believe roosters have souls," I said slowly. "What I believe is that humans should have more heart than that. I can't feel good about people making a spectator sport out of puncture wounds and internal hemorrhage."
Loyd kept his eyes on the dark air above the road. Bugs swirled in the headlights like planes cut loose from their orbits, doomed to chaos. After a full half hour he said, "My brother Leander got killed by a drunk, about fifteen miles from here."
In another half hour he said, "I'll quit Codi, I'm quitting right now." (16.178-80)
Loyd is a deep dude. What do you think he's pondering during that hour? Is he seeing a montage of images like Codi is? Is he thinking about how fighting cocks are basically tiny, feathery Roman gladiators? Or is he thinking about how recreational violence led to the biggest loss of his life?
Quote #6
"Everybody always talked like Leander died of drinking, but he wasn't but fifteen. Not old enough to sit down and order a beer. Everybody forgets that, that he was just a kid. We drank some, but I don't think he was drinking the night he died. There was a fight in a bar."
"What did he die of, then?"
"Puncture wounds. Internal hemorrhage." (18.40-3)
Here's the real reason Loyd quit cockfighting: it wasn't for Codi; it was for his dead brother's ghost.