The Water Dancer Quotes
"Knowing now the awesome power of memory, how it can open a blue door from one world to another, how it can move us from mountains to meadows, from green woods to fields caked in snow, knowing now that memory can fold the land like cloth."
"I remembered this because she’d gifted me with none of it, but more I remembered because it was dancing that brought her to the attention of my father, and thus had brought me to be."
"There is no sensation like drowning, because the feeling is not merely the agony, but a bewilderment at so alien a circumstance."
"All my life I had wanted to get out. I was unoriginal in this—all the Tasked felt the same."
"You have to save him, son. You have to protect him. I don’t just mean tomorrow at race-day. There is so much coming, so much trouble coming for us all, and Maynard, whom I love more than anything, he is not ready."
"What was lost in their labor upon the land could be recouped in their sale, at a premium, Natchez-way, where the land still bloomed."
"You have to remember what I was: not human but property, and a valuable property—one learned in all the functions of the manor, of crops, read, capable of entertaining with my tricks of memory."
"I knew that it was my feeling that Hawkins had been lying to me, lying about where he’d found me, lying about the motive of his questions."
"I was nineteen, and a guarded nineteen who’d worked to feel nothing in this direction, so that when I did feel it, right there in that moment, when I did feel that I loved her, it was not with reason or ritual, nor the way that makes families and homes, but the way that wrecks them, I was undone."
"I did not answer. He said it again, 'Go home.'"
"My whole life depended on me not feeling it, you know?"
"My father believed this insanity. He had to. Maynard was him, was his wife, and this glorified portrait somehow lived right along with the admonition my father had always communicated to me—that Maynard must be watched, that he was not to be trusted with his own life."
"I am telling you that we were us before we were him."
"It was our music that I followed out from the darkness, out from three days, as I was later told, of straddling the line between life and death, of senseless murmuring and frightful fevers."
"And I saw the blue light part the sky and reach down for me, and this time I reached for Maynard, my only brother, tried to save him, but he yanked his arm away, cursed me, and then faded into the darkness of the depths."
"Slavery is everyday longing, is being born into a world of forbidden victuals and tantalizing untouchables—the land around you, the clothes you hem, the biscuits you bake."
"I was freedom-bound, and freedom was as much in my heart as it was in the swamps."
"I put my faith in Georgie. That's all I got."
"The swamps, they got a world down there, a whole Underground, where a man can live as a man should."
"Just get me out of here and I'll get the rest figured myself."
"I dream of men and women who are fit to wash, feed, and dress themselves. I dream of rose gardens that reward the hands that tend to them."
"You are not like them. You must do me the service of giving me that choice."
"Maynard called out from the Goose, Corrine from the mountains, and above all, Natchez."
"The world is moving, moving on without this here country."
"Every soul sent to freedom was a blow against them."
"I don’t know if those documents ever loosed Levity Williams. Everything we did was done under so much secrecy."
"I felt something new arising in me and the new thing was power."
"The power extended out from my right arm, projected itself through the pen."
"But I wondered what became of those who did not make it."
"I never forgot that lesson. It was essential to what I became, to what I unlocked and saw."
"Was he a good man? What did he covet in life?"
"I had, with my gift of memory, inhaled all the facts of the man’s life."
"I must reach beyond all my particular hatred and pain, see them in their fullness, and then, with my pen, strike out and destroy them."
"No man deserves this, but if any did, it would be the masters themselves first, and men like Georgie Parks second."
"I saw that it was time for me to see more of the Underground’s work."
"But what is this Underground beyond what I have seen here?"
"I had lived the whole of my life in service of my father and brother."
"I thought of all the things I would do should I ever again cross the path of Georgie Parks."
"What about Sophia? What about Pete? What about Thena? What about my mother?"
"I drove Corrine in a carriage, one Saturday, and recalled all that I felt while taking Sophia to meet my uncle."
"It was the only time I seen tears in Raymond’s eyes."
"The entire journey took two days, so that I arrived at Gray’s Ferry Station, overlooking the Schuylkill River."
"And so there was no time to think and submit to the cowardly parts of me."
"But I was fresh out of Virginia, fresh out of the pit, Georgie Parks still on my mind, Sophia still lost to me."
"I saw a man who’d loved a woman and lost his name."
"I saw a piece of half-eaten gingerbread on the bench."
"The world would suddenly and randomly fall away and moments later I would return."
"It was the voice that consigned my mother to the ‘down there.’"
"I had wanted out of the Underground and now I had it."
"No matter what power may beat in your breast."
"There were so many holes in me, so many pieces cut away."
"It’s the only time I seen tears in Raymond’s eyes."
"It is not just words we bring, but action to match them."
"I was given a few days’ notice, and was lucky to have even that."
"For the first time in my life, I was aligned with the world around me."
"I have worked with agents of all persuasion and I cannot say that they are moved by the purest of motives."
"Lydia and the children are truly in the coffin, Hiram, and with each day there, the coffin closes a little more."
"This is not the Underground as you understand it, and this is certainly not Corrine."
"I have seen the future. I have seen what we are fighting for."
"So I am in, Raymond. Whatever that means, I am in."
"I felt myself unbalanced by all that I had so quickly consumed."
"They catch you with the babies, tie you to the place by your own blood."
"I am thankful for the fight. But I am most thankful to have seen all that is coming."
"I needed to understand, and for that I needed someone who already understood."
"I realized, could be dwarfed by even greater struggles."
"The sacrifices, Hiram. Tremendous sacrifices."
"It is regrets of Abe that sent me to the Underground."
"But I have learned. I tell you I have learned some things."
"I can’t say what done happened to you, Hiram. But if I were to venture a guess, I would say that there is some part of you that wants to forget, that is trying with all its might to forget."
"We both mighta tasked, but we ain’t tasked the same."
"Every time I’d felt the pull of the thing, felt the river of Conduction rushing along—there had always been water within reach."
"Because, to tell a man a story, you gotta know how it end."
"I would live down here among my losses, among the muck and mess of it, before I would ever live among those who are in their own kind of muck, but are so blinded by it they fancy it pure."
"It’s all right, Hi. It’s all gonna be all right."
"We are not built for this, you know. We are a tropical people, that is what they say."
"My ambition, ma'am, is that you will stop yourself."
"You’ll see it again, friend. You’ll see it again."
"Gotta laugh, Sophia. I have learned that you gotta laugh in this life."
"The world is so beautiful this time of year. There’s a kinda peace that just falls on everything."
"I am struggling to see how telling you that girl was a grass widow would make me anything more than a gossip."
"We are reduced to our surmising upon a nose or eyebrow or a particular demeanor."
"No matter what shall happen, you are remembered to me now. Forget nothing of what you have seen."
"Why did you go? What have I ever done to push you so?"
"I am soon a ghost to you. I have tried, best I could, to be as a mother should."
"I remember her patting juba with her sister Emma, how the shell necklace would shake, how the jar of water stayed fixed upon her head."
"My mother had seen him, had seen through all the noble facade, and she knew what he was."