Unit 7: Vocabulary from Readings

“Lady,” he said, “people don’t care how they lie. Maybe the best I can tell you is, I’m a man; but listen lady,” he said and paused and made his tone more ominous still, “what is a man?”

“Lady,” he said, jerking his short arm up as if he could point with it to her house and yard and pump, “there ain’t a broken thing on this plantation that I couldn’t fix for you, one-arm jackleg or not. I’m a man,” he said with a sullen dignity, “even if I ain’t a whole one..."

She was ravenous for a son-in-law.

The next day he began to tinker with the automobile and that evening he told her that if she would buy a fan belt, he would be able to make the car run.

He looked morose and bitter as if he had been insulted while someone held him.

Every now and then her placid expression was changed by a sly isolated little thought like a shoot of green in the desert.

The late afternoon had grown hot and sultry and the country had flattened out.

After a few minutes there was a guffawing peal of thunder from behind and fantastic raindrops, like tin-can tops, crashed over the rear of Mr. Shiftlet’s car.

His voice, his lips, his wisp of beard, his bony fingers were animated, but give him a moment of repose and his mild blue eyes revealed a depth of sadness, a characteristic that put Leo a little at ease although the situation, for him, was inherently tense.

He now observed the round white moon, moving high in the sky through a cloud menagerie, and watched with half-open mouth as it penetrated a huge hen, and dropped out of her like an egg laying itself.

Salzman, though pretending through eyeglasses he had just slipped on, to be engaged in scanning the writing on the cards, stole occasional glances at the young man’s distinguished face, noting with pleasure the long, severe scholar’s nose, brown eyes heavy with learning, sensitive yet ascetic lips, and a certain, almost hollow quality of the dark cheeks.

He walked briskly and erectly, wearing with distinction the black fedora he had that morning taken with trepidation out of the dusty hat box on his closet shelf, and the heavy black Saturday coat he had thoroughly whisked clean.

...or perhaps a cloven-hoofed Pan, piping nuptial ditties as he danced his invisible way before them, strewing wild buds on the walk and purple grapes in their path, symbolizing fruit of a union, though there was of course still none.

Leo saw a profusion of loaves of bread go flying like ducks high over his head, not unlike the winged loaves by which he had counted himself to sleep last night.

Mercifully, then, it snowed, which he would not put past Salzman’s machinations.

He became touchy and irritable, especially with his landlady, who asked him all manner of personal questions; on the other hand, sensing his own disagreeableness, he waylaid her on the stairs and apologized abjectly, until mortified, she ran from him.

It was exasperating. Just when he needed the matchmaker he was nowhere to be found.

The marriage broker appeared haggard, and transparent to the point of vanishing.

I’ve seen the daylight breaking high above the bough

I’ve found my destination and I’ve made my vow;
so whether you abhor me
Or deride me or ignore me
Mighty mountains loom before me and I won’t stop now.

I’ve found my destination and I’ve made my vow;
so whether you abhor me
Or deride me or ignore me
Mighty mountains loom before me and I won’t stop now.

I’ve found my destination and I’ve made my vow;
so whether you abhor me
Or deride me or ignore me
Mighty mountains loom before me and I won’t stop now.

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into
the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)