Long Day’s Journey into Night Quotations – Flashcards

BLAME/GUILT: Once again, under the influence of morphine, Mary abandons the blame game, recognizing that getting mad at Jamie logically leads to her blaming herself for poor decisions she made in her past (such as, perhaps, marrying James or having Edmund). That's why she says "you lose your true self": she attributes the blame of her past actions to a self that wasn't essentially her, a self that came about due to bad circumstances. FATE: Once again, under the influence of morphine, Mary abandons the blame game and turns to fatalism. She recognizes that getting mad at Jamie logically leads to her blaming herself for poor decisions she made in her past (such as, perhaps, marrying James or getting pregnant with Edmund). That's why she says you lose your true self - she attributes the blame of her past actions to a self that wasn't actually her, but necessarily had to come about due to prior decisions

BLAME/GUILT: Mary's doing her classic "my life changed when I married James and now it's way worse" shtick, but check out how she's positioning James relative to her father. We see here the makings of another important theme for Mary: James is expected to do the double duty of husband and father for Mary. When Mary married James, he became a stand-in, a replacement for her dead father. This pressure on James is intense, and he (perhaps reasonably) fails to live up to her demands.

BLAME/GUILT: Check out how Mary opens by saying she blames only herself, and then immediately blames not just James but also little Jamie. She pretends to be all noble, admitting that she was responsible for Eugene's death, but in reality she thinks James ruined her ability to be a good mother, while Jamie decided to murder his little brother at the age of seven. When she hasn't totally escaped she feels guilty.

BLAME/GUILT: Mary is amazingly insensitive here, blaming her renewed addiction on Edmund for something he obviously can't control. And she doesn't seem to even realize how hurtful this is. She also gets at a really tricky issue that often dominates the study of history - is explaining an action the same thing as excusing it? Her explanation here sounds an awful lot like an excuse, as she generates a causal link between her relapse and Edmund's falling sick.

BLAME/GUILT: Mary's disturbing trend toward blaming others, in spite of her statements to the contrary, is in full force here. She refuses to take responsibility, again holding Edmund responsible for her addiction. She then broadens her criticism really, really far, to the Virgin Mary, who can, if she chooses, give back Mary's faith. There's never a question of Mary searching out that faith again. Instead, the strength has to come from above. Fatalistic viewpoint.

BLAME/GUILT: This is an unusual moment for James, asking for the past to be forgotten, though it makes sense considering what a jerk he was during their honeymoon. What stands out even more, though, is Mary's claim that she remembers but forgives all of James's wrongdoing. Is this really true? It seems to us that perhaps Mary can explain James's behavior, but she never really stops feeling resentful toward him. MEMORY/THE PAST: This is an unusual moment for James, who doesn't usually ask that the past be forgotten - though it makes sense considering what a jerk he was during their honeymoon. Even more interesting, though, is Mary's suggestion that she remembers everything bad James does, but always forgives them. Is this really true though? It seems to us that perhaps Mary can explain James's behavior, but she never really stops feeling resentful toward him, does she? Unless she's in her most abstract "nobody can change anything" philosophical mode, it seems like she does attribute guilt to him.

NOT FACING THE TRUTH: Here Mary makes the connection between memory, the past, and deceit explicit. A life spent trying to battle against the constraints of the past is a life spent lying, according to Mary. We have to remember the context, though, since Mary is high on morphine in this scene. When she isn't on morphine, she wants to move forward and forget about the nasty parts of the past. But which is right? Just because Mary's high, doesn't mean that she's inherently wrong.

BLAME/GUILT: It makes sense, of course, that Edmund would be offended by Mary's morphine-wall-building, because he's spot on - she does it to forget about him and the family. But what he loses sight of here is the fact that he just said he loved doing exactly the same thing when he walks in the fog. See quote six in "Lies and Deceit" for that.

BLAME/GUILT: Cool literary reference here, as Jamie brings up a great poem, Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol." In this poem, Wilde writes about a man threatened to death for killing his wife. He writes: "The man had killed the thing he loved / And so he had to die." Here, Jamie inverts the causality. Instead, once you die on the inside, as Jamie has, you lose control of yourself, and are forced to kill the thing you love (in Jamie's case, Edmund).

SUFFERING: We can see here that, even without considering her own addiction or Edmund's illness, Mary's life in the house is intolerable. She has no one to talk to other than Cathleen, and she feels stifled and lonely. Her life consists entirely of waiting for the other Tyrones to come home and dealing with the servants. This boredom surely contributes to her drug habit. LONELINESS, SOCIETY: This is the start of a series of lines in which Mary basically dehumanizes the servants in her house, considering them inadequate for real human interaction. Basically, she's acting like a snob, wishing she could be a high society lady for a day.

SUFFERING: Here, Mary points to the main reason she suffers. We're clued in, for the first time really, that what upsets her most may not be crumbling family ties, Edmund's health, or her lack of social life. Rather, she is haunted by something in her past, including but not limited to: the death of Eugene and the losses of her religious life, innocence, reputation, sense of home, and/or virginity. MEMORY/THE PAST: Mary is incapable of taking her own advice here. Not only can she not let things go, she constantly obsesses over what is passed - though she keeps instructing her family members to do what she can't and forget. Her inability to forget the past is a driving force behind the decline of Mary's character. FATE: This is the first of Mary's many fatalistic conclusions. The argument is basically this: since things have happened in the past, we can't be blamed for expecting them to happen again. This makes sense in the abstract, but the problem is that it takes away a person's agency if the event actually can be prevented from happening again. Mary has taken away the possibility of human intervention from her equation. There's simply no way to forget the past, and so it must dictate the future.

FATE: In one of the most upsetting moments in the play, Mary finally cracks under James's critical gaze, and confesses to her return to morphine. More to the point, though, we see here the rationale for her constant resort to fate as an explanation for all the ills in her life. We want to believe her when she says she has tried so hard not to get back on morphine, but no matter how hard she tries, she can't kick it.

MEMORY/THE PAST: Right after Mary finishes reminding James how all her friends abandoned her when she married an actor, James reminds her of the time she ran out of morphine and tried to throw herself off the dock. This is too much for Mary, and she begs James not just to keep the thought to himself, but also not to remember it in the first place. Mary keeps insisting that no one can forget the scars life has given them, but in truth, she wants all bad things to be forgotten, especially if they're bad things she's done.

SUFFERING: A revealing comment from James here. The sentiment is fair enough, but check out the order of operations - first, he explains that he would come up if he thought it might help, but then he adds that he's not a jailor and doesn't want Mary to feel imprisoned. The message here is conflicted, and it's obvious he would stop her if he thought he could do so permanently. More importantly, as Mary herself points out, he fails to recognize that this house is a prison for Mary. She sits around lonely all day, and even if he isn't actively in charge of her imprisonment, he is the one who originally locked her up.

SUFFERING: Note the similarity here between this passage and Mary's comments about not feeling at home at their summer house. We get the feeling Mary might not do so well in any social environment that isn't a convent. It seems like she has real trouble making friends, even with people who are nice to her. Might her lonely suffering be as much her fault as James's?

SUFFERING: It's interesting to note that Mary doesn't take for granted that she and her husband are monogamous. It's almost as if she has expected him to cheat on her, and commends him greatly for resisting the temptation.

SUFFERING: Well, that's the question - has she been a bad wife? It's clear James had some major flaws, but it also seems true that Mary is a bit spoiled. Her resentment throughout the play sometimes smacks of privilege, that she deserves better than she gets, and that others ought to be responsible for keeping her content.

SUFFERING: On one level, this speech is just Edmund's finest description of how he sees reality as worthless. But note also that Edmund makes his case by use of mythology and literature (parodying Shakespeare). In other words, the only way to describe life's horrors is indirectly, through literary allusion. In a sense, then, this passage is a justification of the work as a whole - the only way for us to gaze at the horror of real life is elliptically, through the fictionalized portrayal of the Tyrone family.

SUFFERING: This passage gives us an angle on Jamie's suffering that we really didn't have before. In addition to finding out that Jamie acknowledges an addiction he wants to beat, we also discover that he was really counting on his mother to be a role model, and she let him down. Jamie admits that he hadn't completely forsaken his family and the idea that his mother could be an inspiration to him. Now, though, it seems like all hope is lost. DRUGS AND ALCOHOL: In this tragic moment, right before he breaks down in tears, Jamie admits he has an addiction for the first time in this play. Not only does he admit it, but he also says that he was hoping to quit drinking and womanizing, but now he's without hope. This gives us a sympathetic new angle on Jamie, because he hadn't seemed the type to acknowledge his own problems - especially after the "Fat Violet" episode. FAMILY: This passage gives us an angle on Jamie's suffering that we really didn't have before. In addition to finding out that Jamie thinks he has an addiction he wants to beat, we also discover that he was really counting on his mother as a role model, and she let him down. It's interesting to see Jamie admit that he hadn't completely forsaken his family and the idea that his mother could be an inspiration to him. Now, though, it seems like all hope is lost.

SUFFERING: In Act IV, the character we really learn the most about is Jamie, and here we see that literally everything in his life is teetering on the edge of destruction. As we saw in quote nine, Jamie cares much more about his mother than the first three acts suggest, and here we realize, finally, that Edmund really is Jamie's only friend. He doesn't know anyone else and has no resources outside the family. He certainly can't go to James for support. The play's sympathy with Jamie seems a bit delayed, but, when it comes, it's intense.

DRUGS AND ALCOHOL: Cigars are certainly the least frightening drugs that come up in the play, but still, see how early in the text we're introduced to a drug habit. Not only does James have a cigar at 8:30 in the morning, but it's also his first after-breakfast cigar. That is, he has more than one cigar every morning. Not the end of the world, for sure, but we are being introduced very early on to this family's strong dependence on substances.

DRUGS AND ALCOHOL, CAN'T FACE THE TRUTH: This is a fascinating example of the phenomenon we see in quote two above. Just as Cathleen suggests a small drink immediately after describing her uncle's fatal alcoholism, here James lets his son drink despite specific warnings from a doctor that it would be unhealthy for him to do so. There are at least two possibilities here: 1) James legitimately believes that alcohol is healthy and that Doc Hardy is wrong, or 2) James just doesn't want to deprive his son of something that makes him happy, and so weighs Edmund's happiness over the possible health risks. The first, in particular, gives an interesting angle on James - does he actually believe that Doctor Hardy is a poor doctor, implicitly admitting that his money-hoarding has led the family to consult a sub-par health professional?

DRUGS AND ALCOHOL, CAN'T FACE THE TRUTH: Here Mary follows Cathleen and James's leads. It's as if the whole family believes that if they can drink alcohol, then they can be normal, so long as they respect moderation. That is, only an unhealthy family could possibly ban alcohol (what they call "a good man's failing"). To admit that alcohol could be dangerous would be to admit that Edmund isn't a healthy, vital young man. Just like Cathleen, Mary recognizes intellectually (and with reference to a dead relative) that alcohol can be dangerous, but she quickly turns around to make sure neither she nor Edmund thinks that Edmund's in danger of dying.

DRUGS/ALCOHOL, CAN'T FACE THE TRUTH: Immediately after this passage, Edmund cites a long prose poem by Baudelaire about being drunk all the time if you don't want to be "martyred slaves of Time." And Edmund agrees: the best way to deal with Mary's problem is to be too drunk to remember it. But have you noticed they can't do it? No matter how much the Tyrone boys drink, they can't forget Mary's addiction.

DRUGS/ALCOHOL: Sure, the whole experience of sitting on a sailboat is beautiful, and we're all in favor of the environment, but let's be honest about what's going on here: Edmund's saying that the best high he ever got was from nature. His out-of-body experiences in nature have done all that the Tyrones want their drugs to do and so much more. Instead of just forgetting the present reality, this high demolishes the entire idea of reality, and takes you one step further outside the box of your life. Now that's some potent stuff. NOT FACING THE TRUTH: Instead of just forgetting the present reality, this high demolishes the entire idea of reality, and takes you one step further outside the box of your life. Literally, Edmund's experience with nature establishes the entire reality of the world as an elaborate lie, a deceit, and an obscured secret that only a lucky few can see.

DRUGS/ALCOHOL, CAN'T ESCAPE THE TRUTH: This is one of the most famous moments of the play, and for good reason. As the Tyrone men go through one final, ritual gesture of drinking away their sorrows, they're all suddenly, separately caught up in their love and sadness for Mary. Mary has a power over all of them that no drug (morphine or alcohol) can possibly diminish, and the power of this particular tragedy so far outweighs the retreating power of alcohol that the Tyrones all forget about even trying to drown their sorrows for the first time in the play.

MEMORY/THE PAST: Yelling at Jamie here, James criticizes his practice of ignoring anything that's inconvenient, and struggling only when necessary. Jamie tires of arguments quickly, and would prefer to have everyone forget their gripes for a while. Still, it's important to note that Jamie's apathy really only applies actively to his own life - with regard to Edmund and Mary, he wants to face their sickness and addiction, respectively. NOT FACING THE TRUTH: It's interesting that this attack should be directed at Jamie, since throughout the first act, he's the only character in the play who won't forget or back down from Edmund or Mary's problems

MEMORY/THE PAST, DRUGS AND ALCOHOL: Morphine keeps working as a kind of time machine for Mary, a trope that reaches its peak in the play's conclusion. Her method of forgetting about her present pains isn't some sort of out-of-body experience, like Edmund's sailing epiphanies. Instead, she floats off regularly in substance-induced trances to simpler times, before she left her convent and married James.

MEMORY/THE PAST, DRUGS/ALCOHOL: Here we have the clearest indication that Mary is attempting to escape from her present reality through morphine. The foghorn here can work as a symbol, just like Mary's hands, Edmund's sickness, or even conversations with James - all of these things remind Mary of all the suffering in her life, and morphine lets her drift back in time and forget about her worries.

MEMORY/THE PAST, REGRET: We always knew that Mary's hostility toward the family has been centered around her miserable past, and we knew that James's cheapness is also a holdover from his childhood. Here, we learn for the first time that the source of James's obsessive drive to make something of his sons alsoarises from his personal history, because he feels that he missed his chance to be someone great instead of just someone rich. Links to Amanda's "Try and you will succeed!".

MEMORY/THE PAST: This is a poignant moment - James can't even recognize that his wife is carrying her wedding dress in her arm. Even if he can't remember the dress itself, how can he not know what a long, white, satin dress would be for? It's as if the idea of their wedding has completely faded from his memory.

We've already spent a lot of time wondering what Mary might have lost, but whatever it is, it's something representative of days gone by. The whole play, Mary's been trying to wipe away the memory of the past thirty-six years, but whatever she's looking for is something that exists only in her mind. This gives Mary an awkward relationship with her own memory - she wants to erase a part of it, but another part is the most valuable thing she has in the world.

MEMORY/THE PAST: It's interesting that the play itself is based on O'Neill's own memories. (E.2) The "epigraph" more than hints at the fact that we're heading into some stormy autobiographical waters. When O'Neill states to his wife that she has allowed him to "face [his] dead" at last, it makes us think there's some strong connections between O'Neill's family and "the four haunted Tyrones" (E.2). Just checking out O'Neill's basic biography is illuminating. To begin with, his father was James O'Neill, a big-time actor. His mother was Mary Ellen Quinlan O'Neill, a sometime morphine addict. (She went by "Ella.") While O'Neill was a kid, he lived in a series of hotels with his parents, following his father around to performances. Their only semi-permanent home was a summer cottage in Connecticut. He also had two older brothers: James, Jr. (Jamie) and Edmund. Edmund died young, of measles (source). The play seems to only deviate from O'Neill's life story in one major detail: the switch between his own name and that of his brother, Edmund, who died in infancy. O'Neill might've decided on this rather morbid switch for any number of reasons. Maybe he wanted to give his dead brother a chance to live. Though we'll probably never know O'Neill's true motivation for this decision, it's certainly interesting to ponder. It's particularly poignant that O'Neill dedicated this play, with its strong themes of addiction, to his wife Carlotta. She was addicted herself to potassium bromide, a strong sedative that was available at the time. This caused unending trouble to their marriage (source). Evidently, though, it wasn't all depression and disintegration. O'Neill writes to Carlotta that their marriage has been a "Journey into Light - into love" (E.3). With the "epigraph," O'Neill lets us know that, ultimately, he wrote the play as an act of forgiveness - of the people he's loved and of himself.

NOT FACING THE TRUTH: Here's the first comment that we know is a straight-up lie. When Edmund asks Mary to take care of herself, he obviously means not to turn back to morphine, and she responds with an oath on her sacred word of honor - which she has no intention of abiding by. Those are awfully strong words that make it impossible to trust Mary as the play goes on.

NOT FACING THE TRUTH: On the broadest level, this conversation sounds like one of those brain-teasers where someone says, "I always lie" - but then, how can they be telling the truth about the lying? Did we just blow your mind? Anyway, here, we realize that everything Mary says is suspect. Is she manufacturing an excuse, using James and Doctor Hardy, for her drug taking? Is she blaming them for her deceptiveness? Still, in this passage we also see that Mary's denial of her morphine use isn't just something she's manufacturing to tell the guys. On the contrary, she's been struggling withherself to acknowledge that she's back on morphine.

CAN'T FACE THE TRUTH: Don't we sometimes believe things to be true because we want them to be true? Food for thought...

CAN'T FACE THE TRUTH: Edmund makes another huge, meta-philosophical claim here. Just as he said during his sailboat epiphany, that the real world is something different and way less confusing and stressful than what we all experience, Edmund also argues that language is inherently confusing, obscuring the true message of what the speaker's trying to say. This may be tough, but it's interesting to think about the ineffectiveness of language in this play (thesis statement alert). If everyone in the family is a "fog person," can they ever express themselves properly? When Mary's on morphine, can she escape the fog and finally express herself as she wants?

CAN'T FACE THE TRUTH: Mary associates deception with meanness here. While in regular life we might think of deceiving people as not something particularly nice, is deception necessarily mean? For instance, look at Edmund's model of stammering fog people. Deception, for Edmund, is just the way everyone works, and no one can help it even if he wants to.

FATE: Where previously the agent behind Mary's fatalism was some sort of abstract concept like "the effects life has on you" and a more general appeal to the way people work, here she makes her fatalist argument much more concretely. Here, doctors (specifically Doctor Hardy) are the ones responsible for people's sealed fates. Hardy is an agent of destiny, getting Mary hooked on morphine leaving her without any power to resist.

FATE: A fun bit of hypocrisy from James here. He argues that Mary ought to have had more faith in God so that she would have been able to pull through. Of course, what James fails to acknowledge is that he's had a hand in shaking that faith in God by taking her away from the convent. Like Mary, James consistently underestimates the role of his own activities in bringing about the disasters facing his family.

This passage, coming at the end of Act III, gives us a chilling bit of (false!) foreshadowing. It's hard to read this and not expect Mary to end up dead in Act IV. At the same time, it's a reminder of her failed suicide attempt when she tried to jump off the dock. At the most basic level, though, the passage shows us Mary's strange relationship with fate. She clearly wants to die, but refuses to go after her goal willingly. The only acceptable way for her to achieve the happiness she sees in death would be if fate so willed it. She seems to regard the amount of morphine she takes as out of her control.

FATE: Hint: if you ever see this quote (from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar) in a work of literature, you can be sure that fate versus free will is a key theme. This is basically the mother of all fate vs. free will quotes in all of literature. Cassius, in Shakespeare's play, urges Brutus to take responsibility and quit thinking that fate dictates all actions. In other words, when something goes wrong, it's our fault, and the only way for us to fix it is through positive action. James advocates this philosophy, and it stands in contrast with that often supported by Jamie and Mary, who both argue what has happened has shaped what will happen, and we have no control over the process.

FAMILY: Here we can see clearly that Jamie and Edmund have very different roles in the family. Jamie is ten years older and, from the beginning, he was expected to treat Edmund like a baby while he was becoming an adult. You might even sense here a touch of resentment, that Jamie has had to deal with Mary for so much longer than Edmund.

FAMILY: Why, exactly, does Edmund give up his suspicions that Mary's back on drugs? Perhaps because real tenderness like this, which doesn't seem in any way mechanical, is in short supply in the Tyrone household. Edmund hasn't been nurtured all that much, so when he does receive affection, it's really effective. Even more importantly, why does Jamie set his face in embittered, defensive cynicism? Sure, on one hand he's upset that his mom's back on morphine, but is that why he's "embittered"? Isn't it possible that he's jealous of the affection Mary's giving his little brother? Tenderness is in short supply around this place, and we know that Edmund gets pretty much all of what there is. In fact, there's no point in the play in which either parent is really, genuinely tender toward Jamie, and this moment suggests that he resents the lack of family support in his life.

FAMILY: Are these really the reasons Jamie ought to respect his father? Maybe if James were a neighbor down the street - but are hard work, mortality, and monetary support the basis of a stable, respectful relationship between a son and his father? Note that Mary never uses the word "love" here. There's no question of Jamie loving James or vice-versa. Mary is, of course, right that Jamie's rude to his father, but they fail to get at the underlying issue here - Jamie can't respect and admire his father all that much because he knows him too well. These superficial traits like work, age, and money don't define who James is as a person, and so they don't define the person Jamie refuses to respect.

FAMILY/HOME: Mary's diatribe here makes us wonder: why is James even a husband and a father? He doesn't seem to particularly enjoy either role, and he doesn't appear to be very good at either. Should he have stayed a bachelor? Does James enjoy the appearance of a stable family life more than the thing itself? Also, clearly Mary associates the physical structure of the house with the soundness of the family inside of it. A home isn't really a home without a family, and, for all of Mary's complaints about their house's cheapness, what she means more is that the house isn't a home because of the dysfunctional family within it.

FAMILY: Ouch, right? Hard not to feel bad for Jamie here. It's so obvious (and apparently always has been) that Mary loves Edmund way more than she does Jamie. That has to be hard for a kid growing up. No wonder Jamie craves affection outside the house.

FAMILY: We put these two quotes together because it's important to see that both Tyrone parents come from kind of awful family situations. James's dad was obviously an unsupportive father, abandoning his family with six young kids. Mary, on the other hand, had an alcoholic father and a mother who (we learn elsewhere) was jealous of Mary's marriage and said she'd become a bad wife. Not to get too psychoanalytical here, but it's clear that both James and Mary didn't have great role models as parents, and their inexperience shines through.

FAMILY: After this passage, Jamie lists all the ways in which he helped Edmund growing up, and then on the next page, he lists all the ways in which he tried to stunt Edmund's growth to make himself look better. Whatever Jamie was planning to do, the fact of the matter is that he really was a parental figure to Edmund, since Mary was usually on morphine and James was rarely around. Most importantly, though, Jamie was saddled with a role he clearly wasn't prepared for. The cycle of poor parenting, which may have begun even before Mary and James's parents, goes on.

SOCIETY: James doesn't want to look rich, but he certainly doesn't want to look poor. While he laughs at Edmund's joke at Harker's expense, he's upset that Harker might think him low-class for having an impoverished, rude tenant. James also doesn't want to hear Edmund's Socialist rhetoric. In other words, while he resents Harker's airs, James doesn't want to be a part of any revolution that would hurt the rich folk.

SOCIETY: Here we can see that the Tyrones aren't the richest people in the neighborhood (they don't have a Mercedes like the Chatfields), and we begin to see the consequences of their social class limbo. Basically, since they're not poor, they don't associate with the lower class, and since James doesn't want to seem like a rich fat cat, they don't associate with the rich people in town. Thus, the Tyrones don't have a class to fit into, and it's part of the reason why Mary's so lonely. What's more, Mary herself seems conflicted about whether or not she wants to be a part of the rich summer folk social group.

SOCIETY, RESENTMENT: Again, Mary shows some resentment that James has made them look like poor people to the rest of the town. The "home" sentence is particularly important, because we're reminded that Mary hasn't had a place to call home since she was a child.

SOCIETY: At first glance, this seems like another one of Mary's rants about the servants, but there's a lot more that we can learn here. Take a look at those stage directions - why isn't Mary's heart in all this nagging? One likely possibility is that she has complained for so long about this that the issue is more habit than criticism with real emotion behind it. But what if she actually is indifferent to these issues of class? What if complaining about social status is just something she thinks a woman like her ought to do? Perhaps Mary's whole spiel about class and the servants is a product of her own desire to be a part of the class that makes these sorts of complaints, even if the issues don't actually matter much to her.

RELIGION, SOCIETY: We've linked the above quotes because we see that both Tyrone parents really want to look like pious, devout Catholics. In reality, though, their Catholicism appears to be more of a social and ethical posture than an actual religious conviction. The Tyrones never, ever go to church, but that doesn't mean they'll cede their families' culture or the ethical high ground.

This possibly sums up the general style of O'Neill as a playwright, a faithful realism rendered as a stammering poetry. Using the means by which he ordinarily communicates with other men to communicated 'whatever is divine in himself'.