The Waters Quotes

“Rosie wanted her daughter to know who she was before she went out into Nowhere, where terrible things would happen to her. It was hopeless to try to protect a girl--- better you equip her to protect herself. If Dorothy could feel certain of who she was and what she wanted of the world, if she could be confident in her skin, as none of the rest of them had been after a childhood on the island, she could make her way anywhere, do anything.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“Her ability to save other people from their rage by simply reflecting their own light back onto them could only be sustained with energy that had to be replenished. By sunshine, by love, by liquor. But she didn’t know how to use that power of reflection on herself.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters: A Novel

“She opened the oven with a potholder and poked a meat fork into both buttercup squash halves cooking under tinfoil, one stuffed with sausage and sage and the other with butter, apples, black walnuts, and cinnamon. She pressed the side of the fork against the chicken Titus had brought them last night. Herself had inspired to guide Dorothy through stuffing it, and a little extra stuffing was in a pan on the shelf below. As she closed the door, the sausage, cinnamon, and chicken smells wafted into the warm room.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“While they were in the hospital, the Egg Moon had slipped away, and the new Mother's Moon had arrived. After that, in June, would come the Rose Moon, what Ada McIntyre called the Strawberry Moon because strawberries, wild and domestic, ripened. After the strawberries came the mulberries and blackcap raspberries, then the blackberries, the blueberries, and finally, the cranberries.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“Across the road, under the willows, Rose Thorn saw a tangle of purple waterleaf, edible. The May apples had opened their umbrellas over creamy flowers, and a clump of white trillium waved flags of truce, a few of them blushing pink. The foliage between them and the island--- elderberry bushes and silky dogwood--- was already so thick that Rosie could barely see the cottage perched just above the bridge. She didn't understand why she'd wanted to leave this lovely, lush, watery place; at this time of year, she was always sure she'd never want to leave again.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“The island and its women loom large in the dreams of local folks, who sometimes wake up sweating from visions of witches in black (though the island women never wore black) or of crows watchful in treetops, or of swamp streams bubbling up through the floorboards of their houses. It is said the island, where healing waters percolate to the surface, was a place where women shared one another's dreams, a place where women did what they wanted.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“It is nothing new that the greatness of great men often leads to their downfall and that their downfall often pulls the women around them down too. What is new is that Wild Will’s doggedly sober solitude”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters: A Novel

“If both Wild Will and Titus Clay Sr. had not been terrible men, her daughter, with all her genius, wouldn’t be in the world.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters: A Novel

“What most people of Whiteheart did not know for sure, what they did not dare ask God for fear of revealing a lack of faith, was about the value of this earthy life that they sometimes loved and sometimes hated. They wished their ancestors could come to them in sleepless hours and assure them that, beyond the long, dim scramble of making a living and taking care of every urgent thing, there was an importance in each breath taken on this earth as a human animal, a value not dependent on a heavenly reward.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“Molly’s touch soothed him in a way nothing else did, but in spite of this evidence, Roy could not fathom that some knowledge and skills rose not from church or school but out of the Waters and manifested in women’s bodies–Molly’s hands, for example–just as a man who knows only wells driven into the stony earth by a mechanical rig cannot imagine artesian springs of clear, clean water that bubbles to the surface naturally and unassisted, the way it had always been on the island.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“But once people were forced to conform to a rigid schedule, any mysterious use of time made their spouses suspicious. The old men who belonged to the old fraternities began to die off, and the next generation of men feared that gathering in costume to share secrets would be seen as foolish. Many of the old men, upon retirement, moved away somewhere warm without having managed to pass on any wisdom, and those who tried to share what they knew found their sons had grown angry and unable to listen. The old men felt their virility waning, and they were left confused about what it meant to be men. They were terrified of their own womanish inclinations in old age, toward gardening and cooking, terrified of the way their eyes filled with tears at the sight of small children. The only thing they had known for sure was work, and because they were no longer farmers, work no longer made sense.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters: A Novel

“Be careful with hate,” Hermine said. “You can only sustain it at a price.” What she didn’t say was”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters: A Novel

“This is a dog town. A dog gets forgiven for his crimes here. A cat has to pay the price for every transgression. Meow.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“The swell of these feelings is too intense for such men to hold in their hearts without an object to attach it to, so each man has turned the sensation into love and affection for Rose Thorn and both her daughters, and even Hermine Zook, who people say is still alive. This allows them to maintain the love as a living thing, creating more space for teaching their daughters and sons, more tolerance for their spouses, even sometimes a forgiveness for themselves. They feel that love most purely and powerfully, though, when they are near the Waters.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“She wore Hermine's necklace under her shirt every night while she slept, and it soothed her to listen to the whispers of those souls not born, souls who Herself had said were preparing to travel on in their own time. She'd expected to feel wished down by the burden of keeping the necklace safe, but most of what she heard from the string of clinking bodies was laughter, and what she felt was a tickling energy and a sweet pure light rising from someplace without fear or desire, a place of healing kindness without this life's uncertainties. Some of the energy and light she sensed might have come from the relieved and renewed souls of the women who had been free from burdens they could not endure; this energy of having a second chance permeated Donkey's body when she wore the necklace.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“The pinkish light from the east lit up the new baby. The old Mother's Moon to the west, obscured by clouds, was waning. The next moon would be the Rose Moon. A person could change her mind about things. It wasn't illogical to change your mind when you got new information. Like that the earth was round and didn't stretch out forever to ∞.
"I think your name is Rose Moon," she whispered to the baby.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“The big willow clogging the channel was evidence of the damage men could do, but maybe they would be different if they were allowed on the island. Maybe they would learn to be a little more like women. They wouldn't have to start fires here the way they did at Boneset; they wouldn't have to burn the rotting wood where hen-of-the-woods mushrooms grew. Donkey would have to tell them about all the special care the island needed. Every crevice and swollen place needed a certain treatment--- different in spring than in summer or fall. There were nesting sites to watch out for, broken places in a tree's bark that could be sealed with goop to help the tree survive. The women who had lived on the island all this time moved carefully, tenderly, because there was so much to lose.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“That evening, doodling in her book of True Things in the henhouse, Donkey drew a snake who had eaten another snake just barely smaller than itself and so was entirely full, from tip to tail. Then she decided that this snake-eating snake would actually be inside another snake, a rattlesnake, so she drew a third snake around it. And she knew that a king snake, immune to venom, would eat a rattlesnake, so she put a fourth snake around the others. She considered then that the snake doodle moved back in time. Before the biggest snake could eat the second-biggest snake, all the inside eating had to have happened already. What she had drawn could not logically be older snakes eating younger snakes but precisely the opposite. The younger snake grew up big enough to devour the older snake, who'd already devoured its elder, and so on back in time. The nested dolls Rose Thorn had given her were perhaps not mothers with babies inside them, but babies grown large enough to eat their mothers. All her life she was afraid of Herself eating her, but maybe there was--- also or instead--- an opposite problem.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“Near the poison garden, she startled at a sight as exotic as a m'sauga--- something from a fairy tale, something she'd seen only a few times in her life. She lay on her belly and inched closer to the wingstem stalks to see ribbons of ice exuded from the burst-open stems in the shape of a coiled serpent or a complicated rose or a swirl of elegantly whipped cream. A frost flower!”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“Normally, Donkey would have pushed them away, even run to escape their touch, but then Molly laid both hands on her face, and Donkey felt a soothing warmth, a settling. And after that, all the hands in the room were on her, and it felt like the eureka! of discovery. They were no longer five separate bodies in a kitchen but five flowers growing from the same root; whether she hated or loved them wasn't relevant to their work together. Donkey's vision blurred until they all seemed wrapped up together in fog and spiderwebs. Any talk of Donkey being special and precious didn't mean anything, because she was not even separate from them, just the youngest part of the family monster--- and a monster was what it would take to cure Rosie.
Donkey knew now why Herself dreamed of having her daughters gathered together--- because such distance between the parts of a whole was unnatural.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“The three shiny blond heads leaned toward the lamp flame. With steam and a bit of black smoke swirling, the image conjured a fairy-tale vision, with Rose Thorn's long tangled hair splayed across her back so voluminously it could have wrapped around all three of them. Together, these sisters were one creature with six arms and legs, animated by flame, not subject to the earth's gravity as much as to one another's.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“Donkey had spoken to and petted dozens of dogs she'd seen jogging along the road or poking around for food at the edge of the Waters; some of them were traveling dogs, males chasing the scent of females in heat, while others had mysterious agendas they did not share. The cats she met were usually more elusive, hiding out and hunting until Molly saw the signs of their presence and trapped them and took them home and saved their lives all by herself. But dogs were valued in a town that knew them as man's best friend, and usually the loose dogs who appeared on Lovers Road were reunited with their owners or else were taken to the makeshift shelter Smiley Smith's mother had set up, where they were quickly adopted.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“Maybe lions keep their promises not to eat your lambs just until they get hungry.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“Except that it was not fog but a body forming before her eyes out of a stream reflecting golden sunlight, a yellow checkered tablecloth, and the bones of two hundred goldfinches.
Donkey forgot how to breathe. She opened the door wider and in doing so somehow flipped the contents of the hot pan onto the porch planks. Now the figure was fully conjured, tipping back in the chair, as Donkey was forbidden to do. There was Rose Thorn with her bare brown feet resting on the table, legs crossed at her slender ankles, her hands clasped behind her head, shiny hair as windblown as feathers. All around her, in the mid-morning haze, golden light fingered upward. Rosie was as perfect as a perfect number with all her factors adding up to make the sum of her, and the whole day felt fresh and breezy.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“Titus is going to come milk Delilah after seven."
There was a long silence before Herself said grimly, "Don't tell me I raised the kind of girl who waits for a man to milk her cow.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“With her left hand, Herself clumsily tucked the shells into her nightgown and straightened them, each cuntshell wrapped in its cradle of braided lavender or gray or black cotton thread now touching her skin. Herself had told Donkey that each shell was a woman's life saved at great cost, and she needed to keep the shells warm and safe while she lived, giving these souls their time in the world. Baba Rose had had over a hundred shells on her necklace when she'd finally been unable to get out of bed under the burden. Every time Herself told the story of how Baba Rose died, there was another cause, and Donkey had to assume that the ghost whose fire had warmed their cottage for so many years had died of all of it, of everything.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“At the apex of the snake's resistance, its body formed a fine powerful arc that was held momentarily in perfect tension, like a bow. Woman and snake were perfectly attuned to the moment and the task, each focused on the other. Hermine's absolute command over the creature, like her power over all the island, was as inalterable as the equality of the three sides of an equilateral triangle.
The storm-colored m'sauga gradually torqued her thick body into a flattened S in her silent, flowing resistance, matching the resistance of Hermine's right arm, and turned to reveal a smoky ribbed belly. Her mouth opened wide, as if in a yawn, and she revealed a pearly pink-white iridescence, the color of a princess dress or the inside of a river clam. Another wave of morel-mushroom musk rose as the venomous fangs bit the air in a staccato rhythm.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“Donkey's greatest pleasure on any walk, day or night, was in counting, sorting, and measuring the bits and pieces of roots or closed-up flowers or nuts they collected, or the crows in the trees, but Herself sometimes got carried away by a certain kind of breeze, or by the appearance of a wet-looking mushroom poking up through the leaf litter, pink like a dog's penis, or a songbird flying off to leave an exposed egg glowing pale green in the smudged light of the moon. Or after the first hard freeze, a fragile flower made of ice appearing at the base of a wingstem stalk would bring tears to her eyes.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“The Lindworm, a monstrous firstborn twin unwanted by its mother, was thrown out the window shortly after its birth. It came back eventually to claim its birthright. In Donkey's family, where the youngest inherited everything, she didn't have to fear any such thing.
The snake's triangular head ventured toward her a few inches. Donkey was almost too excited to breathe. The creature studied her sullenly.
"If you're the Lindworm, then you're my twin brother," Donkey said. She could feel how the snake was feeling her wild heartbeat through the ground between them.
The forked tongue tasted the air. The body undulated, and the head came even closer.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“Likewise, when she sometimes found arrows stuck in the roots of trees, she quietly unscrewed the shafts and used them to stake plants in the poison garden, where Herself grew hemlock, tall thimbleweed, white snakeroot, swamp milkweed, poison sumac, and bloodroot. Poison ivy with its white berries was ubiquitous on the island and didn't need any special place.
This morning the island was alive with flowery and moldy fragrances, alive with the urgent trills and chirps of birdsong, while more quietly, down low, sounds of scurrying and munching. The island was bursting with spring things to count and measure and eat--- ramps and wild onion sprouts, three-leaved trillium and speckled trout lily, dandelions, horse tails, tender new nettles for tea, pokeweed shoots to boil, fiddlehead ferns to fry.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters