How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #7
A slow corrosion worked between Ennis and Alma, no real trouble, just widening water. (81)
The effects of repression are subtle here. There's not a lot of fights or screaming (well, okay, there's one, but it hasn't happened yet). It's just gradually eating away at them. And what do you know? They aren't talking about it.
Quote #8
"Count the damn few times we been together in twenty years. Measure the f***in short leash you keep me on, then ask me about Mexico and then tell me you'll kill me for needin it and not hardly never gettin it." (117)
This is Jack's moment of truth, where he tells us how much he's had to button it in and how much it's killing him. We don't hear anything similar from Ennis; does that mean that Ennis isn't feeling it as acutely?
Quote #9
Like vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid and now unsayable—admissions, declarations, shames, guilts, fears—rose around them. (118)
Check out this imagery. All of that pent-up emotion suddenly released is described as a geological force of nature. Notice, too, that Proulx is using a piece of Wyoming landscape—thermal springs—to make the comparison. Here, her tendency to describe the emotional landscape through the imagery of the physical one is particularly potent since it's touching on the issue of The Great Unsaid.