The River Between Us Quotes

“I caught a glimpse of happiness, and saw it was a bird on a branch, fixing to take wing.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“She said that time was like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. She meant you could never go back. But of course we had. She'd taken me back.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“This was something Grandma Tilly couldn't understand---how war promises a boy it can make a man out of him.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“A solider must leave someone behind,' she said. 'What men do best is walk away from women. Wars are handy for that.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“Mais non, chère.” She shook her head, weary. “I have no aunt. We know no one beyond our world. We free people of color live on a kind of island, lapped by a sea of slavery. Beyond that sea is this territory up here.” She gazed around the room. “Like the mountains of the moon to us.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“Quadroon, octoroon. There are these names.” She shrugged grandly. “I am a femme de couleur libre, a free woman of color. French blood flow through me and Spanish blood and African blood. It is the African blood they despise. Is it not curious?”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“But New Orleans prefer its customs to the law. Our white fathers buy our mothers fine homes in all the best streets, in Chartres Street. And if there is a daughter, she is brought up by her mother to find a future with a white gentleman of her own. A man of substance. We have a name for this. It is plaçage. A respectable arrangement.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“Like everybody else, we had us a sick drawer and a death drawer in a bureau along the upstairs hall. The sick drawer held our remedies. The death drawer kept a supply of winding-sheets and a selection of garments for when the time come. Mama meant she’d be buried in this dress.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“But just for a moment they were caught in the grip of this place. They felt the weight of its history, and mystery. So did I. The paper was loose and peeling on the walls. I wondered how many layers you’d have to scrape away until you came to the time when these old people were young. If they ever were. I wondered how quiet you’d have to be to hear the voices of those times.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“In the moving picture memory makes,”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“The camera of my memory ducks under the tin-roofed porch and enters the house as everybody did, through the kitchen door.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“The camera of my memory”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“She dances with the pleasure of seeing Dad stride up the hill. To her, he’s “young Bill,” we’re young Bill’s boys. She’s been waiting for this moment. Behind her in a rocker is her husband, older than she is, ancient. Waxy with age, trapped by the years and his chair, but alive behind his eyes.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“I remember it now like a moving-picture show of that time, without sound and all in black and white.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“The whole heat-hazed place looked as old as the rocks it nestled among. It didn’t seem likely to me that anybody had ever been young here.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“You know how these old stories grow in the telling.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“But they were the free people of color. And after the war they had to find new selves. I suppose it was just better to cut their ties and go it alone. Think how many more there must be like them—perched very quiet up on people’s family trees. Safe now from being called ugly names.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us

“But just for a moment they were caught in the grip of this place. They felt the weight of its history, and mystery. So did I. The paper was loose and peeling on the walls. I wondered how many layers you'd have to scrape away until you came to the time when these old people were young. If they ever were. I wondered how quiet you'd have to be to hear the voices of those times.”
― Richard Peck, The River Between Us