How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
She means nothing can be done about it, but it was something. Something slight, but troublesome. Like the time Miss Haywood asked her what time she could do her granddaughter's hair and Violet said "Two o'clock if the hearse is out of the way."(1.55)
Another Grade A Prime example of Violet acting like a nutso, but also acting a whole lot like a jazz riff. She starts with something sensible—"Two o'clock" is a perfectly reasonable answer to the question—but ends up with something a little askew, a little morbid, a little shocking. She starts out in familiar territory, but lands someplace else.
Quote #5
Whenever she thought about that Violet, and what that Violet saw through her own eyes, she knew there was no shame there, no disgust. (4.9)
If you're going to have split personalities, make sure that one of them is shameless and hard to disgust, right? Especially if you live in a world where (as we've seen) so much of what women do is labeled shameful or disgusting. You know, like wearing silk stockings. Violet has a pretty sensible kind of crazy sometimes.
Quote #6
And that's why it took so much wrestling to get me down, keep me down and out of the coffin where she was the heifer who took what was mine, what I chose, picked out and determined to have and hold on to, NO! that Violet is not somebody walking round town, up and down the streets wearing my skin and using my eyes s*** no that Violet is me! (4.9)
Existential crises are much harder when you have various personalities to keep track of, unless, like Violet, you come to the grand epiphany that actually, you're all one big happy self. Who doesn't think of themselves as in someway split? There's a reason that the whole angel-and-devil-sitting-on-the-shoulder-thing is a thing. They represent two sides of yourself, the good Shmooper who is going to eat salad for dinner and the bad Shmooper who is going to eat tater tots.
Violet just phrases real-life in a way that sounds unsettling—it's still true. Kind of like a little musical genre called jazz.