Jacob Have I Loved Quotes
"As soon as the snow melts, I will go to Rass and fetch my mother."
"The ferry will be almost there before I can see Rass, lying low as a terrapin back on the faded olive water of the Chesapeake."
"There are only a few spindly trees. It is the excess of snowball bushes that lends a semblance of green to every yard."
"More important than the crab houses, however, are the boats, tied along the docks."
"I love Rass Island, although for much of my life, I did not think I did, and it is a pure sorrow to me that, once my mother leaves, there will be no one left there with the name of Bradshaw."
"Call and I were right smart crabbers, and we could always come home with a little money as well as plenty of crab for supper."
"It matters to me. Why should a person think a lie’s funny?"
"We could get a pretty little price for a terrapin of that size."
"My grandmother caught me before I got to the door. "Louise Bradshaw! Don’t you go coming in the house dirty like that."
"It’s a joke, Call. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not."
"Our soup always had a spoonful or two of her carefully hoarded sherry ladled into it."
"I suppose my father was used to treating me with a certain roughness, not quite as he would have treated a son, but certainly differently from the way he treated Caroline."
"Monsters always command attention, if only for their freakishness."
"It wouldn’t hurt you to think a little. Your mother’s likely to have heavy groceries."
"All I want you to do is help your poor mother."
"You know full well that little child ain’t got the strength to carry heavy groceries."
"It was useless to withhold information; besides, for once, I didn’t care."
"I wondered idly what fixed memory they would have of me in twenty or thirty years."
"My heart was beating as fast and noisily as the motor of the Portia Sue."
"I sighed. It was obvious that he had a long way to go before he was much of a counterspy, while I was putting myself to sleep at night performing incredible feats of daring on behalf of my embattled country."
"If only there were some other way to make money."
"If she was mine, I'd give her a good smack on the rear. That'd perk her up fast enough."
"February is just plain malicious. It knows your defenses are down."
"Nothing went right for me that summer, unless you count the fact that when my periods began, almost a year after Caroline’s of course, they began on a Sunday morning before I left the house for church instead of after."
"It really was. I no longer wanted the Captain to be a Nazi spy or an interloper. I wanted him to be Hiram Wallace, an islander who had escaped."
"August and February are both alike in one way. They’re both dream killers."
"I was a fool, but I’m proud to say, not that big a fool."
"Why was it so funny? Was it because it was so wonderful to discover something on this island that was free—something unproscribed by God, Moses, or the Methodist conference?"
"Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof…"
"I wanted to say how sorry I felt, but it seemed childish. I hadn’t even lost my boat pole. He had lost everything."
"For all his white beard, he looked like a little boy trying not to cry."
"I can’t explain it. I had not put my arms around another person since I was tiny."
"I knew that anything that made a person feel the way I felt at that moment had to be a deadly sin."
"I couldn’t understand why it meant so much to him."
"I pushed back my chair, nearly knocking him down as I did so, and fled from that terrible house."
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for thou art with me..."
"I’ve got to get away from here before she runs me nuts."
"Each week, he seemed to grow taller and thinner, and his hands were turning more and more into the rough brown bark of a waterman’s."
"Nothing gave me greater satisfaction than totally cleaning out my sister."
"I served the tea with a smile sunk in concrete pilings."
"I suppose I meant never to get up again, but of course I did."
"Males, I thought, always have a chance to live no matter how short their lives, but females, ordinary, ungifted ones, just get soft and die."
"I was not happy in any way that would make sense to most people, but I was, for the first time in my life, deeply content with what life was giving me."
"It was God himself who hated me. And without cause."
"Without God, or a man, I could still conquer a small corner of the world—if I wanted to."
"I suppose if I were to try to stick a pin through that most elusive spot 'the happiest days of my life,' that strange winter on the Portia Sue with my father would have to be indicated."
"It wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t started the war or caused the storm."
"I’d never belonged at that school. I hate them and they hate me."
"Good for you. A lot of times I eat things I don’t really favor."
"Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."
"It is better to live in a corner of the housetop than in a house with a contentious woman."
"You don’t need anything given to you. You can make your own chances."
"God in heaven’s been raising you for this valley from the day you were born."
"I chose to leave my own people and build a life for myself somewhere else."