"When the Emperor Was Divine" - Quotation Collection - The boy

[Robin Nourie]

     "'It's so hot in here, " [the boy] said.

     'Take off your hat then,' said the woman, but the boy refused. The hat was a present from his father. It was big on him, but the boy wore it every day." (14)

This is one of the first indications of the boy's strong attachment to his father, and perhaps too, of just how much he must miss him.

[Sophie Smith]

Secretly, the boy blamed himself. I shouldn't have plucked that leaf... (p100)

[Sophie Smith]

But whenever the boy thought of his father in his last Sunday at home he did not remember the blue suit. He remembered the white flannel robe. The slippers. His father's hatless silhouette framed in the back window of the car. The head stiff and unmoving. Staring straight ahead. Straight ahead and into the night as the car drove off slowly into the darkness. Not looking back. No even once. Just to see if he was there. (p91)

[Jeremy Berman]

But sometimes it slipped out anyway.

Hirohito, Hirohito, Hirohito.

He said it quietly.  Quickly.  He whispered it.

[Jeremy Berman]

P. 52

[Hannah Hanson]

Behind the small but beautiful wooden door there was a second door, and behind the second door there was a picture of the Emperor, which no one was allowed to see. 

For the Emperor was holy and devind. A god.

You could not look him in the eye,

In the dream the boy had already opened the first door and his hand was on the second door and any minute now, he was sure of it, he was going to see God. 

(p.73)

[Hannah Hanson]

"You better come in now," he said quietly. "You'll catch cold"

[Hannah Hanson]

p. 97

[Hannah Hanson]

"Do you think we will see horses?" her brother asked her.

"I dont know," said the girl

...

So she told the boy that they probably would. They probably would see some horses. Because there were more wild horses in Nevada than in any other state. She had read that in National Geographic too. 

"How many do you think we will see?"

"Quite possibly, eight."

The boy seemed satisfied with this answer. He laid his head down on his sister's lap and drifted off to sleep. 

(p.29-30)

[Hannah Hanson]

One night when the flies wer very bad and they could not sleep he had sat up suddenly in his cot and told her that when he grew up he wanted to bea jockey. The boy had never been on a horse before in his life. 

(p.31)

[Sophie Smith]

     One evening, before he went to bed, he wrote his name in the dust across the top of the table. All through the night while he slept, more dust blew through the walls.

     By morning his name was gone. (p64)

[Sophie Smith]

"He had not given the tortoise a name but had scratched his families idenification number onto its shell" (p61)

[Eli Savage]

"The horse meat."

"where do they get it?"

she puckered her lips. "From horses."

"What kind?" 

"The dead kind"

[Eli Savage]

[A. Leonard P. Rittler]

I prege arregiance to the flag...Whatsaalla, Shorty? Solly, so so solly.