How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Laura glances at the clock on the nightstand. It's well past seven. Why did she buy this clock, this hideous thing, with its square green face in a rectangular black Bakelite sarcophagus—how could she ever have thought it was smart? (3.4)
Laura Brown's bedside clock is a symbol of dead time—or, to put it another way, it's the symbolic representation of Laura's sense that she will be trapped forever in the life that she is leading, day after day, hour after hour, for as long as she and her husband live. It's not for nothing that she perceives the clock as something entombed in a "sarcophagus."
Quote #5
These two girls standing beside Clarissa, twenty if not younger, defiantly hefty, slouching into each other, laden with brightly colored bags from discount stores; these two girls will grow to middle and then old age, either wither or bloat; the cemeteries in which they're buried will fall eventually into ruin, the grass grown wild, browsed at night by dogs; and when all that remains of these girls is a few silver fillings lost underground the woman in the trailer, be she Meryl Streep or Vanessa Redgrave or even Susan Sarandon, will still be known. (4.9)
Lots of the novel's comments on time are reflections on mortality. Just as Willie Bass looked at fifty-two-year-old Clarissa Vaughan and saw traces of the young woman she'd been, Clarissa looks at two young women and sees the elderly women—and then the corpses—that they'll become. Cheery.
Quote #6
This neighborhood was once the center of something new and wild; something disreputable; a part of the city where the sound of guitars drifted all night out of bars and coffeehouses; where the stores that sold books and clothing smelled the way she imagined Arab bazaars must smell: incense and rich, dung-y dust, some sort of wood (cedar? camphor?), something fruitily, fertilely rotting; and where it had seemed possible, quite possible, that if you passed through the wrong door or down the wrong alley you would meet a fate […]. (4.10)
Clarissa Vaughan has lived most of her life in New York City, and she knows the city's past and present well. She can trace the passage of time through the city's streets and neighborhoods just as Willie Bass can trace it in her face.