The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute To His White Mother Quotes
"I’m dead. You want to talk about my family and here I been dead to them for fifty years."
"I was born an Orthodox Jew on April 1, 1921, April Fool’s Day, in Poland."
"Rachel Shilsky is dead as far as I’m concerned. She had to die in order for me, the rest of me, to live."
"There were too many rules to follow, too many forbiddens and 'you can’ts' and 'you mustn’ts,' but does anybody say they love you? Not in my family we didn’t."
"He was nobody to fool with, my father. He was hard as a rock."
"I don’t remember the name of the town where I was born, but I do remember my Jewish name: Ruchel Dwajra Zylska."
"My family mourned me when I married your father. They said kaddish and sat shiva."
"The only thing I was allowed to do on the Sabbath was read romance magazines."
"Educate your mind. School is important. Forget everything else."
"I was almost grown before I could eat meat. The sight of my father plunging his knife into that cow was enough to make me avoid it for years. I was terrified of my father. He put the fear of God in me."
"You know what it feels like when people laugh at you walking down the street, or snicker when they hear you speaking Yiddish, or just look at you with hate in their eyes."
"My real name was Rachel, which in Yiddish is Ruckla, which is what my parents called me—but I used the name Ruth around white folk, because it didn’t sound so Jewish."
"It wasn’t like I had a great family life to turn to."
"My favorite food is mayonnaise on white bread."
"To this day you can’t get me near a graveyard. But when I was with Frances, it didn’t bother me a bit."
"A lot of our customers were so poor it wasn’t funny. Black and white were poor."
"I never starved for food till I got married. But I was starving in another way. I was starving for love and affection."
"I thought Jews were something that was in the Bible. I’d heard about them in Sunday school, through Jesus and such. I told Ma I didn’t know they were still around."
"I wanted love, nice clothes, a date. I never had that."
"She was clean as a whistle. Clean. I mean, she ironed herself to death."
"It was a horrible, painful experience and the doctor used no anesthesia."
"I went through this entire ordeal and here he was getting busy with somebody else."
"I made up my mind then that I was going to leave Suffolk for good."
"I wasn’t going to have an arranged marriage like my parents did."
"So I decided to go to the graduation ceremony for her, because Frances was my best friend and I would do anything for her."
"You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself."
"Put yourself in God’s hands and you can’t go wrong."
"The smell of azaleas and the creeping loneliness that climbed over me."
"She was a good Jewish wife who kept true to her religious faith, and she let a lot roll off her back over the years."
"It was a miserable time, especially for my poor sister Dee-Dee."
"I knew I wasn’t raised to drink every day, to work at a gas station, and to get killed fooling around with people like Herman and his gas station knuckleheads."
"It’s just a chicken. It’s not a bird who flies. A bird who flies is special."
"She pushed me away from her just as she’d pushed my elder siblings away when we lived in New York, literally shoving them out the front door when they left for college."
"They ought to take the whole kit and caboodle of these cement parking lots and heave them into the sea."
"There’s such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, and the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life."
"A penetrating loneliness covered me, lay on me so heavily I had to sit down and cover my face."
"The uncertainty that lived inside me began to dissipate; the ache that the little boy who stared in the mirror felt was gone."
"Next to [taking life], all the rules and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by."
"Sometimes without conscious realization, our thoughts, our faith, our interests are entered into the past."
"Anyone who has ever revisited the place of his birth after years of absence is shocked by the differences between the way the place actually is, and the way he has remembered it."
"I later got on as the church secretary, typing out letters for Rev. Brown, and sometimes witnessing weddings which he held in his office, because I’d be the only one around and you needed two witnesses for a wedding."
"I thought it was stress because Dennis was in the hospital longer than I wanted him to be, but when I told him about it, he said, 'If it’s a boy, we’ll call him James after my Uncle Jim.' And that’s how you got named."
"I watched all these weddings made me long for my own."
"She compared them all to my father, but there really was no comparison."