The Mermaid And Mrs. Hancock Quotes
"A man well designed for his station in the world: a merchant son of a merchant’s son."
"Every day the mercury drops. If she does not return soon she will not return, and the blame may well lie with him."
"What knowledge is all this if it dies with Jonah Hancock?"
"Sailors’ lungs may brine and their fingers may pickle; all that protects them is God’s cupped hand."
"This voyage is special, the whisper says, a strange fluttering in his heart."
"The hands of the shipwrights are alive here in the long curves of its beams."
"A wave humps its back and turns over with a sigh, and sends its salted whispering to Mr Hancock’s ear."
"She sits at her dressing table as cool and fragrant as a rosewater custard."
"I have been in more precarious positions than this."
"A man who awaits a ship, as Mr Hancock now does, is distracted by day and wakeful by night."
"The wrong sort gain no admission. No bills. No bailiffs."
"What good his joys and sorrows if there is nobody to share in them."
"He is never visited by his wife Mary in this way, although she was a great blessing to him."
"The ships he sends out into the world cross and re-cross the globe."
"In private, Mr Hancock is not much concerned with his appearance; in society, he wears a wig."
"Ah, now, don't she deserve it? Flowers for your sweetheart? Pretty girl like her, she deserves something for her troubles."
"A change is coming," the woman calls after them, and he feels the muscles clench about his spine where, if he were a dog, his hackles would have risen.
"I believe something unlooked-for has already come to you, ain't that so? You have been surprised of late."
"A change in your station! A change in your fortune!"
I have the sight," she calls, "and the spirits whisper news of you to me.
"Nobody is here," says Sukie, lowering her very black eyebrows.
"Hancock, what is this we hear about a mermaid?"
"Those men are jealous," Sukie says, and he turns to her gratefully.
"Think of their disappointment when their next shipments come in and it is only miserable tapioca as usual, when Jonah Hancock was blessed with a mermaid."
Let this be a lesson to us," he says bravely. "I will buy us a rabbit pie for our dinner – what do you think to that?
We have a ship to earn back!" she snaps. "And a creature people will pay to view. Only a fool would not hold fast.
"I never saw such a thing! And real, is it?"
"You are a lucky man! This is the oddest thing in the city, I am sure of it."
"But poor Sukie, who looks now upon his shame with calm and childish eyes, has suffered most by this."
I sincerely believe we are not," he thinks. "You chose this. I am only following what Fate has thrown my way.
I have lived an unexamined life," he says. "And I have now been shown a great thing. I would be a fool to want no more for myself.
"Pon my soul, you dizzy maid, what were you about?"
"Since his youth he cherished the ambition that a son of his would go to the navy."
"Close the door, for pity’s sake. Do not make me any more of a spectacle."
"If I wish my mermaid to succeed, I must learn to conduct myself in these circles."
"What a joy it is to bask a-bed with a man of one’s own choosing!"
"Every kindness has its price, Mrs Neal, and one so precariously set up as you would do well to know your own means."
"Ah, what to do? Six thousand, eight thousand, ten thousand?"
"He thinks of himself in his counting-house, the evening before the mermaid arrived, alone and silent, surrounded by such unbearable lack."
"He takes up his pen, warm from the visitor’s hand, and he adds another zero."
"Mr Hancock must steel his jaw to prevent it from flapping open."
"‘It is, if I may say, monstrous.’ ‘But it is real.’"
"‘You have had your freedom for the week, ’tis not my lookout what you used it for.’"
"‘Stay with me,’ she hissed, a skinny girl, as tidy then as she is now."
"‘We may yet.’ ‘No, we may not. George takes care of us.’"
"‘You are turning away good connections,’ entreats Mrs Frost."
"‘What decent woman finds she must keep herself together at all?’ he demands."
"‘I shall need a new one.’ ‘As it should be.’"
"‘I’ve a new venture in mind – I need a ship right away.’"
"‘We are the lost. We dart minnow-quick.’"
"‘It don’t matter what it looks like. It is desired by everyone and yet it belongs only to him.’"
"‘Aye, you did – you are a fine little helper. And now I have done my part too.’"
"‘And what do you get in return, should you acquire the thing she wants?’"
"‘I’ve not travelled those waters since I was a boy.’"
"‘My hiring you would be no more than an act of charity,’ says Mr Hancock."
"‘You are ladies quite apart from the common water.’"
"‘They each went out in search of an affaire du coeur, and it is no accident that they found one another.’"
"‘We have comradeship,’ rejoins he. ‘It is not nothing to commune with others who understand our own experience.’"
"I find myself an I. An only. How has this come to be? I am enclosed. I cry out and my cry cannot swim, cannot speed away from me; it bounces back."
"I am caught in a bubble, in a box, in a vessel, and there is no expanse any more, across which my sisters’ voices reach me."
"Do not go along with any amusement they demand of you; you are not their servant or their whore. Refuse them a small thing immediately: that will help train them."
"She shrieks with mirth that slips into horror."
"I cannot remember a time before I was making this dress!"
"You are a woman entirely out of the common water; we all desire to sample every sort of woman there is in the world."
"No, you have let me down too often; you have been petulant and unreliable."
"I have been abandoned by a – by a most inconstant friend, and consequently my rent has gone unpaid, and I have creditors all over town that I knew nothing of until this week."
"You are a sharp one. All right, I have come to visit you. I wish to speak with you. May I come in?"
"I have bought you that house, my angel."
"I have never been so pleased with myself."
"You imagine this is of no consequence to you, but this business is what keeps you in bacon rinds."
"I am glad to say it is not mine, nor ever will be; trouble me with it no more."
"I am going to check this creature. It will pay for what it has robbed me of."
"I will have it rule us not one minute longer."
"I am mistress of it, am I not? It belongs to me."
"And what of my husband’s history? At his age he was surely not a bachelor!"
"I had more men than I can keep count of, you know."
"Why would I not conduct myself as I know how?"
"If I had had the child, would things here be different?"
"I was a celebrated whore for ten years."
"I shall parade it like the beast it is."
"I do feel as if some weight has fallen from me."
"How it will be made enticing I cannot think."
"You will be astownded. I am sorry to have seen so little of you."
"She is stripped, in short, of all possible identifiers, and unashamed to drift there quite as God made her, an arresting little person with her small full mouth and long-lashed eyes and stern dark brows."
"If God had made her with gills she would stay in the bath all day."
"A nervous complaint. The night wandering – the rages – the lack of care for her own person. One sees it often enough in girls her age, although what they have to weigh so heavy on their minds I am sure I cannot guess."
"‘Look,’ she says, ‘it will be easier than you think. For she is not a solid creature.’ She plunges her arm into the vat and makes a fist."
"‘What is this for?’ asks Sukie. ‘What has come over you?’ ‘Darling! Dear heart! You do not know!’"
"‘No, but what?’ she asks. ‘Is it alive?’ ‘You must wait and see.’"
"‘We rush young and bright, and ever widening, and these bitter atoms are lost in new-minted freshness.’"
"‘And if I am made of grief, well! Here is joy, and if I am made of fury, here is peace.’"
"‘I am a great tumble of motion which torrents all in unison.’"