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I thought it would be fun to revisit The Water Dancer since we barely scratched the surface when we discussed it so long ago. I also thought a fun way to revisit this book would be to scour my notes and underlines and pick out my top 5 favorite quotes:
"I remember how these young couples would hold one another, each morning before going to their separate tasks, how they would clasp hands at night, sitting on the steps of their quarters, how they would fight and draw knives, kill each other, before being without each other, kill each other, because Natchez-way was worse than death, was living death, an agony of knowing that somewhere in the vastness of America, the one whom you lived most was parted from you, never again to meet in this shackled, fallen world." Pgs. 45-46.
"For it is not simply by slavery that you are captured, but by a kind of fraud, which paints its executors as guardians at the gate, staving off African savagery, when it is they themselves who are savages, who are Mordred , who are the Dragon, in Camelot's clothes." Pg. 100.
"But I will like you a heap less if your plan is for us to get to this Underground and for you to make yourself up as another Nathaniel. That ain't freedom to me, do you understand? Ain't no freedom for a woman in trading a white man for a colored." Pg. 111.
"Slavery was the root of all struggle. For it was said that the factories enslaved the hands of children, and that child-bearing enslaved the bodies of women, and that rum enslaved the souls of men. In that moment I understood, from that whirlwind of ideas, that this secret war was waged against something more than the Taskmasters of Virginia, that we sought not merely to improve the world, but to remake it." Pgs. 251-52.
"All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. . . They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave." Pg. 370-71.
I would love to hear other people's favorite quotes or if any of these quotes stir other points of interest.