Flowering Judas

by

Katherine Anne Porter

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Flowering Judas makes teaching easy.
Need another quote?
Need analysis on another quote?
Need analysis for a quote we don't cover?
Need analysis for a quote we don't cover?
Need analysis for a quote we don't cover?
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
Request it
Request it
Request analysis
Request analysis
Request analysis
Flowering Judas Quotes

Laura, who haunts the markets listening to the ballad singers, and stops every day to hear the blind boy playing his reed-flute in Sixteenth of September Street, listens to Braggioni with pitiless courtesy, because she dares not smile at his miserable performance. Nobody dares to smile at him. Braggioni is cruel to everyone, with a kind of specialized insolence, but he is so vain of his talents, and so sensitive to slights, it would require a cruelty and vanity greater than his own to lay a finger on the vast cureless wound of his self-esteem. It would require courage, too, for it is dangerous to offend him, and nobody has this courage. Braggioni loves himself with such tenderness and amplitude and eternal charity that his followers—for he is a leader of men, a skilled revolutionist, and his skin has been punctured in honorable warfare—warm themselves in the reflected glow, and say to each other: “He has a real nobility, a love of humanity raised above mere personal affections.”

Related Characters: Laura, Braggioni
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:

The gluttonous bulk-of Braggioni has become a symbol of her many disillusions, for a revolutionist should be lean, animated by heroic faith, a vessel of abstract virtues. This is nonsense, she knows it now and is ashamed of it. Revolution must have leaders, and leadership is a career for energetic men. She is, her comrades tell her, full of romantic error, for what she defines as cynicism in them is merely "a developed sense of reality.

Related Characters: Laura, Braggioni
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:

She has encased herself in a set of principles derived from her early training, leaving no detail or gesture of personal taste untouched, and for this reason she will not wear lace made on machines. This is her private heresy, for in her special group the machine is sacred, and will be the salvation of the workers. She loves fine lace, and there is a tiny edge of fluted cobweb on this collar, which is one of twenty precisely alike, folded in blue tissue paper in the upper drawer of her clothes chest.

Related Characters: Laura
Page Number: 92
Explanation and Analysis:

“I am disappointed in everything as it comes. Everything." He shakes his head. "You, poor thing, you will be disappointed too. You are born for it. We are more alike than you realize in some things. Wait and see. Some day you will remember what I have told you, you will know that Braggioni was your friend.”

Related Characters: Braggioni (speaker), Laura
Page Number: 93
Explanation and Analysis:

“Let them sweat a little. The next time they may be careful. It is very restful to have them out of the way for a while.”

Related Characters: Braggioni (speaker), Laura, The Roumanian and Polish Agitators
Page Number: 94
Explanation and Analysis:

“If you will throw him one little flower, he will sing another song or two and go away.”

Related Characters: Lupe (speaker), Laura, The Minstrel
Related Symbols: The Judas Tree
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:

She is not at home in the world. Every day she teaches children who remain strangers to her, though she loves their tender round hands and their charming opportunist savagery. She knocks at unfamiliar doors not knowing whether a friend or a stranger shall answer, and even if a known face emerges from the sour gloom of that unknown interior, still it is the face of a stranger. No matter what this stranger says to her, nor what her message to him, the very cells of her flesh reject knowledge and kinship in one monotonous word. No. No. No. She draws her strength from this one holy talismanic word which does not suffer her to be led into evil.

Related Characters: Laura
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:

“They are stupid, they are lazy, they are treacherous, they would cut my throat for nothing.”

Related Characters: Braggioni (speaker), Laura
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:

There will be two independent processions, starting from either end of town and they will march until they meet, and the rest depends…” He asks her to oil and load his pistols. Standing up, he unbuckles his ammunition belt, and spreads it laden across her knees. Laura sits with the shells slipping through the cleaning cloth dipped in oil, and he says again he cannot understand why she works so hard for the revolutionary idea unless she loves some man who is in it.

Related Characters: Braggioni (speaker), Laura
Related Symbols: The Silver Ammunition Belt
Page Number: 99-100
Explanation and Analysis:

“Today, I found Eugenio going into a stupor. He refused to allow me to call the prison doctor. He had taken all the tablets I brought him yesterday. He said he took them because he was bored.”

Related Characters: Laura (speaker), Braggioni, Eugenio
Page Number: 100
Explanation and Analysis:

Murderer! said Eugenio, and Cannibal! This is my body and my blood.

Related Characters: Eugenio (speaker), Laura
Related Symbols: The Judas Tree
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:
No matches.