Libertie Quotes
"The best way to help is to stay quiet and stay out of the way."
"It's his home now. We have to make it comfortable for him."
"The guiding principle is that like cures like."
"The male seahorse is a virtuous beast, romantic and loyal, steadfast in his heart and in his affections, the moral light of the animal kingdom."
"She was wearing them the day she met your good and kind father."
"I hear it lapping at my ear, you know. I hear it crashing."
"The psalms tell us that the Lord heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds."
"Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit."
"It’s when the spring goes dry that people appreciate the value of water."
"What’s good about the heart is that it does not reason."
"I’ve never thought about it, Libertie. I don’t know that I can answer."
"I am tired of bending over women’s stomachs, and I am tired of feeling for babies’ limbs under skin, and I am tired of smelling the sickroom breath of women who won’t even look me in the eye."
"To watch Experience and Louisa sing was the same as seeing a fast, small boy run or a man swing an ax and break up a tree. It was the same singularity of form and muscle, the same pushing of a body toward a single point on the horizon."
"Mama had taught me long ago—the first tell of good health is the mouth."
"I imagined a whole life for them there, while I watched. I thought they would never be what Madeline Grady said everyone at the college was: colorstruck."
"When the evening was over, I stood beside them. 'You are wonderful,' I said to Experience."
"You’ll hear the trumpet sound, To wake the nations underground, Looking to my God’s right hand, When the stars begin to fall."
"I’d rather have had my mother and her obliviousness. There is a greater comfort in being unseen than being understood and dismissed."
"I regarded that quilt as a kind of private joke, something no one who had eyes could believe."
"The only man I had seen up close was Mr. Ben, and he was not described by any of the words on that quilt."
"I knew that anyone with a voice as powerful as that could teach me how to bend my anger to my will."
"I had not counted on the Graces’ fear of death. By the time we reached Philadelphia on our journey back east, we had slept in the barns and sheds and church pews of smaller towns."
"I had hoped that there would be a place where I found other burning bushes like me, willing to make the world anew with riotous anger."
"I did not go home for winter term, so my grades were given to me directly to mail to my mother, which I did not do."
"I had never called me clever, or smart, or good with patients, or even particularly hardworking."
"In those days, in Brooklyn, Tom Thumb weddings were all the rage."
"You’ll hear the sinner moan, To wake the nations underground, Looking to my God’s right hand, When the stars begin to fall."
"But I saw, from the way his mother held in her laugh, that the joke was not a gamble."
"I could understand that," he said. "Revolution already happened there."
"I did not see how that was possible now. Because in my fantasy, Louisa and Experience would stay with me always, would never leave me."
"I thought, 'Had we really stood under those trees and talked of marriage?'"
"I felt the grass, insistent, on the bottom of my shoes."
"I am sick of the smell of other women’s blood, Mama. Please."
"It's as if they are your new eyes and your new heart."
"You’ve never wanted me to feel something in the same way you do?"
"It was nothing like when the Graces sang. It was nothing like when we sang at home in Kings County. It did not look like any fellowship I had known, but the bishop was proud of it, and much of the time spent in church was giving thanks for his intelligence, his humanity, and his hard work here."
"When you learn to swim, your body is no longer your own. It becomes enthralled to another dimension, that of the water. Your limbs are weightless, but you can feel your hair and clothes becoming heavy."
"I have received the notice from Cunningham College. And I understand, now, why you married that silly boy in haste."
"Love would not make you think you had to flee your only mother."
"I cannot think of a greater freedom than raising you from a babe in arms to a girl. You were mine, and I decided what you heard, who you listened to, what words formed on your lips."
"Who has broken me. Who has deceived me. Who stood before me in a wedding gown and said, 'I love you, Mama.'"