If people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones.
The first conversation between Sal and Phoebe occurs at school. Phoebe sits across from Sal and says, "Sal, you're so courageous. You're ever so brave" (13). Sal comes to realize that some of the things that frighten her classmates in Euclid, like spiders and critters, don't frighten her at all. When she carries a spider to the window of her classroom, her classmates are shocked. But she's surprised to hear Phoebe call her brave out of the blue, because so many things do frighten her. She lists things like brain tumors and car accidents. But Sal's point is that people's expectations of us affect how we act, and the people around us can have an influence on our perception of ourselves—positive or negative—if we let them.
It is surprising all the things you remember just by eating a blackberry pie.
At dinner with Phoebe's family, Sal eats blackberry pie for dessert. Sal remembers picking blackberries with her mother on the farm in Bybanks. She also remembers going to see her father in one of the fields after he has built a new fence. The next day Sal comes down to breakfast to find a dish of shiny blackberries at her place which her mother has left. Her parents hug and kiss and it is very romantic. Sal cannot believe how many memories are triggered by the simple act of eating blackberries, but the blackberry symbolizes so many of her experiences and connections with her mother.
My mother is missing, and my father hands me a dictionary.
Phoebe is exasperated by her father's cold, emotionally unavailable response to her mother leaving. Phoebe's statement, made to Sal, comes after she tries to get out of going to school by telling her father she's feeling ill. Her father takes her temperature and accuses her of malingering. Phoebe doesn't know what malinger means, so she asks her father to clarify, and he hands her a dictionary. The disjunct between the two clauses in Phoebe's statement, i.e., how her father's response seems so inane and insufficient given the gravity of the moment, is both comedic and significant to the thematic framework of the novel. His response is emblematic of the Winterbottoms' repression.
A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.
This is John's response to Sal when Sal says they never should have let Chanhassen leave. This quote speaks to a few of the novel's major themes, including love and domesticity. "Caging a person" takes on a broader meaning here than simply preventing someone from leaving a place; it also refers to hemming them in and limiting their potential by ascribing to them certain expectations and obligations that don't align with their own internal drive.
That night I kept thinking about Pandora's box. I wondered why someone would put a good thing such as Hope in a box with sickness and kidnapping and murder. It was fortunate that it was there, though. If not, people would have the birds of sadness nesting in their hair all the time, because of nuclear war and the greenhouse effect and bombs and stabbings and lunatics.
Phoebe presents on the Greek myth of Pandora's box to Mr. Birkway's class, and her presentation gets Sal thinking about the importance of hope in a world where so many tragic, unpredictable things may happen. The "birds of sadness" refers to one of the mysterious notes left on Phoebe's porch, cautioning its reader against allowing birds of sadness to "nest in their hair."
It was fine seeing the presidents, I've got nothing against the presidents, but you'd think the Sioux would be mighty sad to have those white faces carved into their sacred hill. I bet my mother was upset. I wondered why whoever carved them couldn't have put a couple Indians up there too.
This quote by Sal touches on the novel's theme of cultural identity. Sal recognizes the injustice of Mount Rushmore featuring only white Americans and erasing the culture of Native Americans. The infraction is even more egregious because the mountain is a sacred place for the Sioux people. Sal imagines her mother encountering the landmark on her bus tour and thinks she would be upset by it.
Maybe dying could be normal and terrible.
During a lesson about the Longfellow poem, "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls," Sal and Phoebe launch into an anxious tirade about how terrifying and depressing the poem is. The notion of death and mortality triggers Sal, who is still mourning her mother, and Phoebe, who frequently jumps to morbid conclusions. While everyone in the class rattles off their interpretation of the poem, Ben chimes in with his wise hypothesis.
I felt as if I was torn in two pieces. Half of me was ogling the scenery. I had to admit that it was as pretty as—maybe even prettier than—Bybanks.
Trees and rocks and mountains. Rivers and flowers. Deer and moose and rabbits. It was an amazing country, an enormous country.
Sal considers the majesty of Montana as she descends into Idaho. Here it becomes evident how the trip has expanded her perspective, because she admits that a place could be even prettier than her beloved Bybanks.
For one quick moment we both had the same agenda. I looked at him and he looked at me. Both of our heads moved forward. It must have been in slow motion, because I had a split second there to be reminded of Mr. Birkway's drawing of the two heads facing each other, with the vase in between. I wondered briefly, just for an instant, if a vase could fit between us.
Ben and Sal's first kiss takes place on the university hospital lawn, as Ben's mother wanders nearby. Sal's mention of a vase refers to the optical illusion Mr. Birkway showed to their class that could be seen and interpreted as either a vase, two people facing each other, or both. Sal's mention of an "agenda" refers to one of the mysterious fortunes Mrs. Partridge left on the Winterbottoms' porch that proposed that everyone has their own agenda, which Sal tends to agree with. Here, she suggests that she and Ben share an agenda and so suggests that they are connected in a deep and personal way.
On the tombstone, beneath her name and the dates of her birth and death, was an engraving of a maple tree, and it was only then, when I saw the stone and her name—Chanhassen 'Sugar' Pickford Hiddle—and the engraving of the tree, that I knew, by myself and for myself, that she was not coming back. I asked if I could sit there for a little while, because I wanted to memorize the place. I wanted to memorize the grass and the trees, the smells and the sounds.
This is a pivotal moment in the novel, immediately following the climax, where Sal finally accepts the death of her mother as true and final. For the duration of the novel, Sal refuses to acknowledge her mother's death, which by extension means the reader isn't aware, unless they pick up on the clues and suggestions, that Sal's mother isn't actually waiting for her in Idaho.
