Half Broke Horses

by

Jeannette Walls

Lily Casey Smith Character Analysis

The protagonist and narrator of the story, Lily Casey Smith grows up in the rural West over the first half of the twentieth century. Fiercely independent and resourceful, Lily’s no-nonsense attitude allows her to thrive even in the face of natural disaster, personal tragedy, and reductive attitudes toward women. Lily respects people who do not complain about their lot in life, and is extremely hardworking. Raised by a carriage horse trainer, she feels a strong connection to horses and begins “breaking” them—or making them submissive—at age six. She also loves school and excels academically, but is forced to drop out when Dad uses her tuition money to buy Great Danes. Not content with waiting around for a man to propose to her on the family ranch, at age fifteen Lily makes a 500-mile journey across the desert to reach Red Lake, where she gets her first job as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. She loves teaching because it is one place where she can be her own boss, and she finds the work of educating impoverished children—especially girls—deeply fulfilling. When she loses her job due to the return of many certified teachers at the end of World War I, she takes a train by herself to Chicago. She lives in the city for eight years, during which time she works as a maid and attends rallies for women’s suffrage with her friend and roommate Minnie Hagan. She also has a brief, doomed marriage to the two-timing Ted Conover. Upon discovering that he has another wife, Lily annuls the marriage but also asserts her strength by telling Ted that he could never “destroy” her. Indeed, Lily reveals her strength of character repeatedly throughout the story by refusing to bow to restrictive gender roles or arbitrary societal rules with which she disagrees. Upon deciding she wants children, she approaches Jim Smith about marriage, and insists that their union be an equal partnership. She proves invaluable to keeping their family afloat during the Great Depression and while running a 180,000-acre ranch. When the family moves to Phoenix, Lily quickly grows weary of the bureaucracy that accompanies teaching and living in the city. Like Jim and her children, Rosemary and Little Jim, Lily is most at peace when living in harmony with the natural world. Even so, she embraces modern technology’s ability to improve work at the ranch and to bolster her own sense of independence. Much as she enjoys riding horses, she grows to love driving cars and, above all, flying airplanes—to Lily, the ultimate symbol of progress and personal freedom.

Lily Casey Smith Quotes in Half Broke Horses

The Half Broke Horses quotes below are all either spoken by Lily Casey Smith or refer to Lily Casey Smith. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Women’s Strength in a Man’s World Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1  Quotes

The windmill still lay toppled over the caved-in house, and the yard was strewn with branches. Dad was always going on about the easterners who came out to west Texas but weren't tough enough to cut it, and now we were folding our hand as well. Sometimes it didn't matter how much gumption you had. What mattered were the cards you'd been dealt.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker)
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2  Quotes

Most of the other girls came from rich ranch families. Whereas I was used to hollering like a horse trainer, they had whispery voices and ladylike manners and matching luggage. Some of the girls complained about the gray uniforms we had to wear, but I liked the way they leveled out the differences between those who could afford fancy store-bought clothes and those of us, like me, who had only home-dyed beechnut brown dresses. I did make friends, however, trying to follow Dad’s advice to figure out what someone wanted and help her get it, though it was hard, when you saw someone doing something wrong, to resist the temptation to correct her. Especially if that someone acted hoity-toity.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Dad / Adam Casey
Page Number: 38-39
Explanation and Analysis:

Mom and Dad always talked as if it was a matter of course that Helen and I would marry and Buster would inherit the property, though I had to admit I'd never actually met a boy I liked, not to mention felt like marrying. On the other hand, women who didn't marry became old maids, spinsters who slept in the attic, sat in a corner peeling potatoes all day, and were a burden on their families, like our neighbor Old Man Pucket’s sister, Louella.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Dad / Adam Casey, Mom / Daisy Mae Peacock, Helen, Mother Albertina, Buster, Old Man Pucket
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:

The problem with half-broke horses like these was that no one took the time to train them. Cowboys who could ride anything caught them and ran them on fear, spurring and quirting them too hard, taking pride in staying on no matter how desperately they bucked and fishtailed. Not properly broken, they were always scared and hated humans. A lot of times the cowboys released them once the roundup was over, but by then they'd lost some of the instincts that kept them alive out in the desert. They were, however, intelligent and had pluck, and if you broke them right, they made good horses.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker)
Related Symbols: Half Broke Horses
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3  Quotes

I'd been on the road, out in the sun and sleeping in the open, for twenty-eight days. I was tired and caked with dirt. I'd lost weight, my clothes were heavy with grime and hung loosely, and when I looked in a mirror, my face seemed harder. My skin had darkened, and I had the beginnings of squint lines around my eyes. But I had made it, made it through that darned door.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Mother Albertina, Patches
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:

I couldn't help feeling a little burned about being told by Fish Face that I was now unqualified to do something I'd spent the last four years doing.

Superintendent Maclntosh seemed to know what I was thinking. "You're young and strong, and you got pretty eyes," he said. "You just find yourself a husband—one of these soldier boys—and you'll be fine."

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Mr. MacIntosh (speaker)
Page Number: 69
Explanation and Analysis:

As I listened to Dad, I could feel myself pulling away from him. All my life I'd been hearing Dad reminiscing about the past and railing against the future. I decided not to tell him about the red airplane. It would only get him more worked up. What Dad didn't understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Dad / Adam Casey
Related Symbols: The Red Airplane
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:

But no matter how much planning you do, one tiny miscalculation, one moment of distraction, can end it all in an instant. There was a lot of danger in this world, and you had to be smart about it. You had to do what you could to prevent disaster. That night at the boardinghouse, I got out a pair of scissors and a mirror, and although Mom always called my long brown hair my crowning glory, I cut it all off just below my ears.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Mom / Daisy Mae Peacock, Minnie Hanagan
Page Number: 73
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

I discovered that I loved cars even more than I loved horses. Cars didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn’t leave big piles of manure all over the place. Cars were faster than horses, and they didn't run off or kick down fences. They also didn't buck, bite, or rear, and they didn't need to be broke and trained, or caught and saddled up every time you needed to go somewhere. They didn't have a mind of their own. Cars obeyed you.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Jim Smith
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:

The parents of my schoolkids included cattle rustlers, drunks, land speculators, bootleggers, gamblers, and former prostitutes. They didn't mind me racing horses, playing poker, or drinking contraband whiskey, but my showing some compassion to a sister who'd been taken advantage of and then abandoned by a smooth-talking scoundrel filled them with moral indignation. It made me want to throttle them all.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Helen, Mr. MacIntosh
Page Number: 107
Explanation and Analysis:

She was convinced that Mom in particular would never forgive her for bringing shame on the family. Mom and Dad would disown her, she believed, the same way our servant girl Lupe's parents had kicked her out when she got pregnant. No man would ever want her again, Helen said, she had no place to go. She wasn't as strong as me, she said, and couldn't make it on her own.

"Don't you ever feel like giving up?" Helen asked. "I just feel like giving up."

"That's nonsense," I said. "You're much stronger than you think. There's always a way out." I talked again about the cottonwood tree. I also told her about the time I was sent home from the Sisters of Loretto because Dad wouldn't pay my tuition, and how Mother Albertina had told me that when God closes a window, he opens a door, and it was up to us to find it.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Helen (speaker), Dad / Adam Casey, Mom / Daisy Mae Peacock, Mother Albertina, Lupe
Page Number: 108
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

I realized that in the months since Helen had died, I hadn't been paying much attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn't really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker)
Page Number: 113
Explanation and Analysis:

A distinctly malodorous aroma arose from the hole, and for a moment I missed my snazzy mail-order toilet with the shiny white porcelain bowl, the mahogany lid, and the nifty pull-chain flush. As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they're necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don't need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things—though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart—and at the ranch, I could see, we'd have pretty much everything we'd need but precious little else.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker)
Page Number: 133
Explanation and Analysis:

"Just you remember," I said, "that this is what could happen when an animal gets freedom. Animals act like they hate to be penned up, but the fact is, they don't know what to do with freedom. And a lot of times it kills them."

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Rosemary
Page Number: 142
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

That, I came to see, was the heart of the matter. You were free to choose enslavement, but the choice was a free one only if you knew what your alternatives were. I began to think of it as my job to make sure the girls I was teaching learned that it was a big world out there and there were other things they could do besides being brood-mares dressed in feed sacks.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker)
Page Number: 165
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

But the Jesuits were used to dealing with untamed ranch boys, and they regarded Little Jim as one more rambunctious rapscallion. Rosemary's teachers, however, saw her as a misfit. Most of the girls at the academy were demure, frail things, but Rosemary played with her pocketknife, yodeled in the choir, peed in the yard, and caught scorpions in a jar she kept under her bed. She loved to leap down the school's main staircase and once took it in two bounds only to come crashing into the Mother Superior. She was behaving more or less the way she did on the ranch, but what seemed normal in one situation can seem outright peculiar in another, and the nuns saw Rosemary as a wild child.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Rosemary, Little Jim
Related Symbols: Half Broke Horses
Page Number: 192
Explanation and Analysis:

Dad's death didn't hollow me out the way Helen's had. After all, everyone had assumed Dad was a goner back when he got kicked in the head as a child. Instead, he had cheated death and, despite his gimp and speech impediment, lived a long life doing pretty much what he wanted. He hadn't drawn the best of cards, but he’d played his hand darned well, so what was there to grieve over?

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Dad / Adam Casey, Helen
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Cars were supposed to mean freedom, but all these people stuck in traffic on one way streets—where you weren't even allowed to make a U-turn to get the hell out of the jam—might as well have been sitting in cages. … Nothing had ever made me feel as free as flying and I was only a few hours away from getting my pilot’s license so I decided to take up lessons again. The airport had a flying school, but when I showed up one day, the clerk passed me an entire sheaf of forms and started yammering about eye exams physicals, takeoff slots, elevation restrictions and no-fly zones. I realized that these city folks had boxed off and chopped up the sky the same way they had the ground.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Red Airplane
Page Number: 224
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

I felt there was a lot more I could say about the subject of danger. I could have given her an entire lecture on it, talking about my dad getting his head staved in by a horse when he was three, about my Chicago friend Minnie getting killed when her hair got caught in machinery, about my sister, Helen, taking her own life after accidentally getting pregnant. Life came with as much adventure and danger as any one body needed. You didn't have to go chasing after them. But the fact of the matter was, Rosemary hadn't really listened to what I had to say ever since that time we visited the Havasupai and I gave her the whipping for swimming with Fidel Hanna.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Dad / Adam Casey, Helen, Rosemary, Minnie Hanagan, Fidel Hanna
Page Number: 257
Explanation and Analysis:

I shook my head and looked at the lilies. "I could cut you all the slack in the world, but I still think my daughter needs an anchor."

"The problem with being attached to an anchor," he said, "is it's damned hard to fly."

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Rex Walls (speaker), Rosemary
Page Number: 258
Explanation and Analysis:

As Rosemary climbed into the car, Rex patted her behind like he owned it, then got in beside her. They were both still laughing as Rex gunned the motor the way he always did.

Jim put his arm around me and we watched them take off up the street, heading out into open country like a couple of half-broke horses.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Jim Smith, Rosemary, Rex Walls
Related Symbols: Half Broke Horses
Page Number: 265
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Half Broke Horses LitChart as a printable PDF.
Half Broke Horses PDF

Lily Casey Smith Quotes in Half Broke Horses

The Half Broke Horses quotes below are all either spoken by Lily Casey Smith or refer to Lily Casey Smith. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Women’s Strength in a Man’s World Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1  Quotes

The windmill still lay toppled over the caved-in house, and the yard was strewn with branches. Dad was always going on about the easterners who came out to west Texas but weren't tough enough to cut it, and now we were folding our hand as well. Sometimes it didn't matter how much gumption you had. What mattered were the cards you'd been dealt.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker)
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2  Quotes

Most of the other girls came from rich ranch families. Whereas I was used to hollering like a horse trainer, they had whispery voices and ladylike manners and matching luggage. Some of the girls complained about the gray uniforms we had to wear, but I liked the way they leveled out the differences between those who could afford fancy store-bought clothes and those of us, like me, who had only home-dyed beechnut brown dresses. I did make friends, however, trying to follow Dad’s advice to figure out what someone wanted and help her get it, though it was hard, when you saw someone doing something wrong, to resist the temptation to correct her. Especially if that someone acted hoity-toity.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Dad / Adam Casey
Page Number: 38-39
Explanation and Analysis:

Mom and Dad always talked as if it was a matter of course that Helen and I would marry and Buster would inherit the property, though I had to admit I'd never actually met a boy I liked, not to mention felt like marrying. On the other hand, women who didn't marry became old maids, spinsters who slept in the attic, sat in a corner peeling potatoes all day, and were a burden on their families, like our neighbor Old Man Pucket’s sister, Louella.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Dad / Adam Casey, Mom / Daisy Mae Peacock, Helen, Mother Albertina, Buster, Old Man Pucket
Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:

The problem with half-broke horses like these was that no one took the time to train them. Cowboys who could ride anything caught them and ran them on fear, spurring and quirting them too hard, taking pride in staying on no matter how desperately they bucked and fishtailed. Not properly broken, they were always scared and hated humans. A lot of times the cowboys released them once the roundup was over, but by then they'd lost some of the instincts that kept them alive out in the desert. They were, however, intelligent and had pluck, and if you broke them right, they made good horses.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker)
Related Symbols: Half Broke Horses
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3  Quotes

I'd been on the road, out in the sun and sleeping in the open, for twenty-eight days. I was tired and caked with dirt. I'd lost weight, my clothes were heavy with grime and hung loosely, and when I looked in a mirror, my face seemed harder. My skin had darkened, and I had the beginnings of squint lines around my eyes. But I had made it, made it through that darned door.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Mother Albertina, Patches
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:

I couldn't help feeling a little burned about being told by Fish Face that I was now unqualified to do something I'd spent the last four years doing.

Superintendent Maclntosh seemed to know what I was thinking. "You're young and strong, and you got pretty eyes," he said. "You just find yourself a husband—one of these soldier boys—and you'll be fine."

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Mr. MacIntosh (speaker)
Page Number: 69
Explanation and Analysis:

As I listened to Dad, I could feel myself pulling away from him. All my life I'd been hearing Dad reminiscing about the past and railing against the future. I decided not to tell him about the red airplane. It would only get him more worked up. What Dad didn't understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Dad / Adam Casey
Related Symbols: The Red Airplane
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:

But no matter how much planning you do, one tiny miscalculation, one moment of distraction, can end it all in an instant. There was a lot of danger in this world, and you had to be smart about it. You had to do what you could to prevent disaster. That night at the boardinghouse, I got out a pair of scissors and a mirror, and although Mom always called my long brown hair my crowning glory, I cut it all off just below my ears.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Mom / Daisy Mae Peacock, Minnie Hanagan
Page Number: 73
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

I discovered that I loved cars even more than I loved horses. Cars didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn’t leave big piles of manure all over the place. Cars were faster than horses, and they didn't run off or kick down fences. They also didn't buck, bite, or rear, and they didn't need to be broke and trained, or caught and saddled up every time you needed to go somewhere. They didn't have a mind of their own. Cars obeyed you.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Jim Smith
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:

The parents of my schoolkids included cattle rustlers, drunks, land speculators, bootleggers, gamblers, and former prostitutes. They didn't mind me racing horses, playing poker, or drinking contraband whiskey, but my showing some compassion to a sister who'd been taken advantage of and then abandoned by a smooth-talking scoundrel filled them with moral indignation. It made me want to throttle them all.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Helen, Mr. MacIntosh
Page Number: 107
Explanation and Analysis:

She was convinced that Mom in particular would never forgive her for bringing shame on the family. Mom and Dad would disown her, she believed, the same way our servant girl Lupe's parents had kicked her out when she got pregnant. No man would ever want her again, Helen said, she had no place to go. She wasn't as strong as me, she said, and couldn't make it on her own.

"Don't you ever feel like giving up?" Helen asked. "I just feel like giving up."

"That's nonsense," I said. "You're much stronger than you think. There's always a way out." I talked again about the cottonwood tree. I also told her about the time I was sent home from the Sisters of Loretto because Dad wouldn't pay my tuition, and how Mother Albertina had told me that when God closes a window, he opens a door, and it was up to us to find it.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Helen (speaker), Dad / Adam Casey, Mom / Daisy Mae Peacock, Mother Albertina, Lupe
Page Number: 108
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

I realized that in the months since Helen had died, I hadn't been paying much attention to things like the sunrise, but that old sun had been coming up anyway. It didn't really care how I felt, it was going to rise and set regardless of whether I noticed it, and if I was going to enjoy it, that was up to me.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker)
Page Number: 113
Explanation and Analysis:

A distinctly malodorous aroma arose from the hole, and for a moment I missed my snazzy mail-order toilet with the shiny white porcelain bowl, the mahogany lid, and the nifty pull-chain flush. As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they're necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don't need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things—though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart—and at the ranch, I could see, we'd have pretty much everything we'd need but precious little else.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker)
Page Number: 133
Explanation and Analysis:

"Just you remember," I said, "that this is what could happen when an animal gets freedom. Animals act like they hate to be penned up, but the fact is, they don't know what to do with freedom. And a lot of times it kills them."

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Rosemary
Page Number: 142
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

That, I came to see, was the heart of the matter. You were free to choose enslavement, but the choice was a free one only if you knew what your alternatives were. I began to think of it as my job to make sure the girls I was teaching learned that it was a big world out there and there were other things they could do besides being brood-mares dressed in feed sacks.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker)
Page Number: 165
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

But the Jesuits were used to dealing with untamed ranch boys, and they regarded Little Jim as one more rambunctious rapscallion. Rosemary's teachers, however, saw her as a misfit. Most of the girls at the academy were demure, frail things, but Rosemary played with her pocketknife, yodeled in the choir, peed in the yard, and caught scorpions in a jar she kept under her bed. She loved to leap down the school's main staircase and once took it in two bounds only to come crashing into the Mother Superior. She was behaving more or less the way she did on the ranch, but what seemed normal in one situation can seem outright peculiar in another, and the nuns saw Rosemary as a wild child.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Rosemary, Little Jim
Related Symbols: Half Broke Horses
Page Number: 192
Explanation and Analysis:

Dad's death didn't hollow me out the way Helen's had. After all, everyone had assumed Dad was a goner back when he got kicked in the head as a child. Instead, he had cheated death and, despite his gimp and speech impediment, lived a long life doing pretty much what he wanted. He hadn't drawn the best of cards, but he’d played his hand darned well, so what was there to grieve over?

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Dad / Adam Casey, Helen
Page Number: 199
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Cars were supposed to mean freedom, but all these people stuck in traffic on one way streets—where you weren't even allowed to make a U-turn to get the hell out of the jam—might as well have been sitting in cages. … Nothing had ever made me feel as free as flying and I was only a few hours away from getting my pilot’s license so I decided to take up lessons again. The airport had a flying school, but when I showed up one day, the clerk passed me an entire sheaf of forms and started yammering about eye exams physicals, takeoff slots, elevation restrictions and no-fly zones. I realized that these city folks had boxed off and chopped up the sky the same way they had the ground.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Red Airplane
Page Number: 224
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

I felt there was a lot more I could say about the subject of danger. I could have given her an entire lecture on it, talking about my dad getting his head staved in by a horse when he was three, about my Chicago friend Minnie getting killed when her hair got caught in machinery, about my sister, Helen, taking her own life after accidentally getting pregnant. Life came with as much adventure and danger as any one body needed. You didn't have to go chasing after them. But the fact of the matter was, Rosemary hadn't really listened to what I had to say ever since that time we visited the Havasupai and I gave her the whipping for swimming with Fidel Hanna.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Dad / Adam Casey, Helen, Rosemary, Minnie Hanagan, Fidel Hanna
Page Number: 257
Explanation and Analysis:

I shook my head and looked at the lilies. "I could cut you all the slack in the world, but I still think my daughter needs an anchor."

"The problem with being attached to an anchor," he said, "is it's damned hard to fly."

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Rex Walls (speaker), Rosemary
Page Number: 258
Explanation and Analysis:

As Rosemary climbed into the car, Rex patted her behind like he owned it, then got in beside her. They were both still laughing as Rex gunned the motor the way he always did.

Jim put his arm around me and we watched them take off up the street, heading out into open country like a couple of half-broke horses.

Related Characters: Lily Casey Smith (speaker), Jim Smith, Rosemary, Rex Walls
Related Symbols: Half Broke Horses
Page Number: 265
Explanation and Analysis: