How we cite our quotes: (Story.Section.Paragraph) or (Story.Paragraph)
Quote #1
They want what you got but they don't want you. They want what I got only it ain't mine. That's what makes 'em so hungry for me when I sing. They getting the flavor of something but they ain't getting the thing itself. They like a pack of hound dogs trying to gobble up a scent. (Nineteen Fifty-Five.127)
Traynor has this profound thought about the song he'd bought from Gracie Mae Still and turned into a hit. His audience, it turns out, is willfully blind to the source of their favorite beats: they want the song but not its real meaning. And they certainly want the hip-shaking, handsome Traynor, not 300-pound Gracie Mae.
This bit also highlights how the music industry often manipulates discriminatory practices to promote white entertainers—always at the expense of people like fictional Gracie Mae. Traynor gets it, but that doesn't keep him from being used (up) himself by the industry.
Quote #2
He begins to feel sick. For he realizes that he has bought some if not all of the advertisements about women, black and white. And further, inevitably, he has bought the advertisements about himself. (Coming Apart.69)
The husband in Walker's "fable" has a moment of clarity in the middle of his wife's education of him. He finally understands how media forces have been shaping his ideas over the years. It's a rude awakening, especially since he'd been rolling along with it and enjoying himself all this time. What he hasn't understood up to this point is how much his use of other people (like his wife and the women in the porn mags) really harms them.
Quote #3
Because, in truth, she grew used to being served by Mrs. Hyde, had come to expect her service as her due, and was jealous and contemptuous of Mr. Hyde—a dull little man with the flat, sour cheeks of a snake—who provided his wife little of the excitement Andrea Clement White felt was generated spontaneously in her own atmosphere. (Fame.14)
This is the story that the famous (but hugely insecure) Andrea Clement White tells herself about her assistant, Mrs. Hyde. It's her way of justifying her thoughtless and cruel behavior toward her—and making herself look like a benefactor of epic proportions. As in, look how I'm saving you from a boring life, Hyde. It's hard to know if any of Clement White's observations about Mr. and Mrs. Hyde are true, but we're betting that Mrs. Hyde might have a different story if she had a chance to tell it.