How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"The seat of human emotion should be the liver," Doc Homer said. "That would be an appropriate metaphor."
[...]
I understood exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who'd been stabbed everywhere, more severely in the liver. It's an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the wound with fresh wounds, and you try and you try and you don't give up until there's nothing left. (21.84)
Closing a wound with more wounds, Codi is pretty metal here. But the point is that healing from traumas—literal and emotional—isn't easy. It's a pretty painful thing to do, in fact.
Quote #8
"They kidnapped her one morning in a cotton field," I said. "They kept her prisoner for weeks and weeks, and we kept hoping, but then they moved everybody to another camp and some of the prisoners they shot. Eight of them. Hallie and seven men. All of the men were teachers. They had their hands tied behind them and shot them in the head and left the bodies all sitting in a line at the side of the road, in a forest right near the border. All facing south."
I felt a hard knot in my chest because this was the one image I saw most clearly. I still do. [...]
"The man that found them was driving up from Esteli, coming along the road, and at first when he saw them all sitting there he thought, 'Oh that's too many. I can't give them all a ride, they won't fit in my truck.'"(25.114-5)
It seems important to note that the image Codi can't get out of her mind is like Doc's pictures: in reality, the people are dead, but they look to the driver like hitchhikers. What's essential here, of course, is that Codi is using the specificity and horror of that image and the mistake it creates to fix this in the mind of herself and her listener—to make it something to remember. Instead of accepting an altered past, Codi's fixating on the truth of the image.
Quote #9
In another fifteen minutes he hears scrubbing. She is cleaning the floor. The toilet has flushed more than two dozen times. There are rules concerning all of these things. (13.23)
This one isn't explicitly violent—although it is extremely gross. Anyway, it suggests the bloody mess that Codi must have been dealing with in the bathroom. The emphasis here is less on the violence itself than the lengths that little baby Codi will go to just to cover it up. Forgetting can be pretty hard work.