The Promise Quotes

“I want a woman that can give him things I can’t. I want better for him, the right way to talk, manners and suchlike. Now, me and you, we don’t much know each other anymore, but I recall this about you. You do things right.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise: A Novel

“The last note drifted away, swallowed up by the whispering surf. A kind of clumsiness came over the dancers as they broke apart, the swell of the music still in their blood but the planked floor flat under their feet.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“She put one hand up on the broad crest of his shoulder and he took the other, swallowing it up inside of his. They stood straight as could be, her looking up at him, and him looking at her. I played on but them two were stuck, that spark shooting between them. Around them, people gave each other high-eyebrow looks.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“Night is, in truth, the hour of solitude, in which the contemplative soul is regenerated in the universal peace. We become ourselves; we are separated from the factitious life of the world, and placed in the closest communion with nature and with truth.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“All this work that needed doing, but here I sat at Oscar’s kitchen table because my knees were wobbling and my sorrow was bigger than me.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“Andre chirped away about playing out in the rain, the fun of puddles and making mud pies. ‘But you’ll get so dirty,’ Mrs Williams said, and I said that was what little boys did best. ‘They play in the mud and come into the house to shake it all off.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“Honey,’ Mama said. ‘There are times when leaving is called for. That’s how I see it. So you go on with this. You’ve given enough to that man.’ I went to bed, Mama’s words running through my head. I would have given more, but things had a way of not working out, leastways not like how I wanted.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“Beneath the sky’s vastness, I felt free, all restraints gone.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“Other times me and Bernadette talked about the oddness of the world and how there were just enough good times to make the rough patches easier.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“She could play the piano to make a person want to fall right down and cry. But tonight, I’d been the one sitting on the stool playing music with Biff and Camp. We were the ones that raised folks to their feet and got them to dance. We were the ones that set hands clapping. Tonight, I’d stepped right up to the curse that I laid over the men that cared for me and decided I could still find my pleasures. I didn’t sit with the old people; I didn’t spend the evening fussing over the food. Tonight, with everybody watching, I put my bow to the fiddle strings and showed another side of me.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“The candlelight from the lanterns that hung from nails on the support pillars made every woman pretty. The hollows and lines that came from hard work had eased into shadows.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“April, and more bills. I sought distraction and several times a week, I found myself at the public library. There, I wandered the stacks of books or sat in the reading room with a book on my lap.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“The 1900 Galveston storm was the worst US natural disaster in the twentieth century. The city, population 37,789, was submerged in 8 to 15 feet of water, and prior to the wind destroying the Weather Bureau’s anemometer, the last recorded wind velocity was 84 miles per hour. It is speculated that during the height of the storm the winds ranged from 120 to 150 miles per hour. Historians estimate that over 6,000 people were killed in the city and that another 1,000 perished on the rest of the island. On the mainland, the death toll was approximately 1,000. The Promise is a work of fiction but I tried to keep the depiction of the island, the sequence of the storm, and the aftermath grounded in fact as much as possible. A great deal has been written about the city of Galveston but very little about the people who lived outside of the city limits.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“From that, a person wouldn’t know it was twenty-seven miles long and up to three miles wide in the middle. They wouldn’t know it held buildings and people. Sitting at my desk in the back row, I’d raised my hand and after a while the schoolteacher, Miss Marquart, called on me. ‘What’s keeping us from floating away?’ I said. ‘God’s will.’ ‘That’s all?’ I got a whipping for asking a disrespectful question about God, and I figured I deserved it since what I’d said came out wrong.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“Her story about an Ohio storm that split open one tree and burned down a carriage house was nothing, not to me. I didn’t know where Ohio sat but I figured it didn’t have water on all sides. Galveston was my home and you won’t catch me saying one bad word against it. But I remembered from my schoolgoing days the map of the United States. It was pinned up on the wall by the chalkboard. Texas was big, like it deserved to be. It outshined every other state by a mile. But a person had to look hard to find Galveston. It was off to the side of Texas, just a sliver of land in the Gulf of Mexico.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise

“Watching the tides put a hole in my pocket,’ Oscar said. ‘So I found a job here at the dairy. The wages were low, but the work came with a bed and meals, and I got so I liked it. When Old Man Tarver died, he left the dairy to his daughter over in Houston. She didn’t want the life, said ten cows were ten too many for her. She set a fair price and I bought it from her.’ He paused. ‘Cleared my debt three years ago.’ A point of pride, I thought. ‘You’re a self-made man.’ ‘That’s the shined-up version of stubborn.”
― Ann Weisgarber, The Promise