Animal Dreams - themes & quotes I found provocative

page numbers are from the Harper Perennial paperback edition

Memory; truth, interpretation (and reinterpretation) of the past.

• Blurring photographs
• Inability to remember her childhood
• memory: Doc Home losing his, Codi regaining hers
• 294 “They don't want to see a Nolina when they look at me. They want a man they can trust with their children's ear infections. And I am that man. If you change the present enough, history will bend to accommodate it.” “No, I'm pretty sure you're wrong about that. What's true is true, no matter how many ways you deny it.”
• 303 My whole childhood. Most of it I had no idea was there. And most of it's happy. But Loyd, it's like the tape broke when I was fifteen, and my life started over then. The life I'd been living before that was so different - I don't know how to say this but I just couldn't touch that happiness anymore, I'd changed so much. That was some other little bright-eyed, righteous girl parading around trying to rescue drowning coyotes and save chickens from the stewpot. A dumb little kid who though thee sun had a smiley face on it.
• 336 I remembered every toy, every birthday party, each one of these fifty mothers who'd been standing at the edges of my childhood, ready to make whatever contribution was needed at the time.

Relationships, love and loss

• Loss of her child as a turning point
• Codi’s afraid to lose things that she cares about, so she tries not to care about them: "I almost think I could go to Denver. Carlo is safe because I don't really love him that much. If he stopped wanting me around one day, it wouldn't be so terrible. I wouldn't die." (206)
• I'd marked myself early on as a bad risk, undeserving of love and incapable of benevolence. It wasn't because of a bad grade on a report card, as she'd supposed. It ran deeper than that. I'd lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay. Hallie could call that attitude a crutch, but she didn’t know, she hadn't loved and lost so deeply. (240)
• 243 I wasn't keeping to any road, I was running, forgetting what lay behind and always looking ahead for the perfect home, where trains never wrecked and hearts never broke, where no on you loved ever died. Loyd was a trap I could still walk out of.
• 303 “Codi, for everyone that's gone away, there's somebody that's come to you.” “you can't replace people you love with other people. They're not like old shoes or something.” “No. but you can trust that you're not going to run out of people to love.”
• 334Truly, I think they would have listened to me all day. It occurred to me that such patience might be the better part of love.
• 345 He understands for the first time in his life that love weighs nothing. Oh God, his girls are as light as birds.
• When Codi is talking to her father him she calls him "Pop", but when she's talking to anyone else she calls him Doc Homer.

community, acceptance, belonging, fitting in

• "I'm still that girl, flattered to death if somebody wants me around" (206)
• I think these are inaccurate self-assessments on Codi’s part: "I was suddenly disgusted with what I was doing. I'd go anywhere Carlo wanted, I'd be a sport for my students in Grace, I'd even tried to be a doctor for Doc Homer, just as I'd humiliated myself in the old days to get invited to birthday parties. If I kept trying to be what everybody wanted, I'd soon be insipid enough to fit in everywhere." (207).
• 243 It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to go looking for it somewhere else.
• 304 I could still feel a small, hard knot of anger and I held on to it. It was my wings. My exit to safety.

Motivation, orientation, hope

• 231 It's not some perfect ideal we're working toward that keeps us going...What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, "What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?" I didn’t look down from some high rock and choose cotton fields in Nicaragua. These cotton fields chose me.
• 231 I was getting a dim comprehension of the difference between Hallie and me. It wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but of something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.
• 243 The thought of Hallie's last letter still stung me but I tried to think abstractly about what she wanted to tell me: about keeping on the road because you know how to drive. That morality is not a large, constructed thing you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.
• 305 The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That's about it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides. I can't tell you how good it feels. I wish you knew. I wish you'd stop beating yourself up for being selfish, and really BE selfish, Codi. You're like a mother or something. I wish you knew how to squander yourself.
• 344 “Hallie was a protagonist of history.” “She wanted to save the world.” “No, Pop, that's not true. She wanted to save herself. Just like we all do.” “Save herself from what?” “From despair. From the feeling of being useless. I've about decided that the main thing that separates happy people form the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or socket wrench”
• 344 He thinks people's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
• 334 You have to learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist of history rather than a spectator.