Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Brokeback Mountain Open Forum

Favorite lines from Proulx's story- an Ode to TOB

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Mikaela:
All the ones mentioned belong to my favourites - I was pondering which one to choose but I better get a move on here! I'll go with this one, more down-to-earth, less lyrical than the previous ones, but the only one that I really, really miss in the otherwise perfect movie:

That's one of the two things I need right now.

brokeback-fan:
Yes, there are so many wonderful lines in this story.  One of my favorites and one that has so many meanings including religious iconography:

"...because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded."


Annie Proulx is a literary genius!!  :) Read her books.  They are treasures.

Thank you, Annie.

fernly:
All of the ones you've chosen already,
and this one -
(I always love juxtaposed adjectives that you'd never think of together, until an author like Annie Proulx writes them that way)

"There were only the two of them on the mountain flying in the euphoric, bitter air"

Brown Eyes:

--- Quote from: JennyC on June 06, 2006, 05:19:00 pm ---I always wonder why "northern plains".  Is it because the cold and wildness of the northerm plains?  There used to be a thread on IMDB PT discussing the meanings of some lines in the short story. I loved that thread.

--- End quote ---

Well, for me the idea of the "northern plains" just suggests vast loneliness.  It seems to me to be characterized by large expanses of open space where a person could feel very tiny and isolated.  Also plains are the opposite of mountains... so Ennis here is feeling oppressed by plains (flat land) as opposed to his ideal place, a mountain (i.e. Brokeback mountain, to which he can never return... not even to return Jack's ashes). Since this line comes following Jack's death, well, it just makes me weep for Ennis.

OK, this is more than a "line" but it always blows me away.  Talk about the power of nature as an active component/ symbol in the relationship. 

"The next week Joe Aguirre sent word to bring them down - another, bigger storm was moving in from the Pacific - and they packed in the game and moved off the mountain with the sheep, stones rolling at their heels, purple clouds crowding in from the west and the metal smell of coming snow pressing them on.  The mountain boiled with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken-cloud light, the wind combed the grass and drew from the damaged krummholz and silt rock a bestial drone.  As they descended the slope Ennis felt he was in a slow-motion, but headlong irreversible fall."


I love that the wind (the symbol many of us see as Jack) and earth/ stone (the symbol many of us think of as Ennis) are so significant here... and that the wind makes the stones sing!

serious crayons:

--- Quote from: atz75 on June 06, 2006, 08:46:46 pm ---" As they descended the slope Ennis felt he was in a slow-motion, but headlong irreversible fall."

--- End quote ---

Amanda, you took the words right out of my fingers. This line is a good description of the way Ennis must have felt -- and you can really see it in that scene in the movie!

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