How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Inman never did know what seized him at that moment, but he stepped out the door and set the hat on his head at a dapper rake and walked away, never to return. (1.5)
Inman ran away from school as a kid, during a lesson about war. Who's surprised?
Quote #2
It was with a familiar delicious tingle of pleasure, a tightening in her breathing, that she realized she was now similarly hidden away, that anyone walking from the gate to the porch would never know she was there. (2.10)
Remember that great place you found for hide and seek as a kid? The one where nobody could find you? Ada does too. But why is she happier when she's hiding? Maybe there's a freedom in it that she can't find around people at this point in the novel.
Quote #3
At another time the scene might have had about it a note of the jaunty. All the elements that composed it suggested the legendary freedom of the open road: the dawn of day, sunlight golden and at a low angle; a cart path bordered on one side by red maples, on the other by a split-rail fence; a tall man in a slouch hat, a knapsack on his back, walking west. But after such wet and miserable nights as he had recently passed, Inman felt like God's most marauded bantling. He stopped and put a boot on the bottom rail of the roadside fence and looked out across the dewy fields. He tried to greet the day with a thankful heart, but in the early pale light his first true vision was of some foul variety of brown flatland viper sliding flabby and turdlike from the roadway into a thick bed of chickweed. (3.1)
Inman's road-tripping, and he should be having a great time miles from every care. But he's not really free because he's escaping a war, not to mention the Home Guard. Is freedom actually possible in his situation?