That Water, Those Rocks Quotes

“In general, we imagine rivers to be subject to a kind of dynamic equilibrium, largely stable geologic features, with processes like regional incision or subtle shifts in mountain building causing short- and medium-term variation around some slowly changing mean condition, but in fact it is far more common to see dramatic change over short periods, with long periods of stability between in what geologists refer to as 'dynamic metastable equilibrium.'
It is the same with families, memory, the history of a person's life, what we believe to be true.”
― Katharine Haake, That Water, Those Rocks: (A Novel)

“When a basket is woven, each strand of grass, or reed, or wool, or root, must pass repeatedly through human hands, and this, the principle of human touch, is what remains long after the artifact has lost utility or form, something, I think, about life being lived in its physical moment, something, it must be, about grace.”
― Katharine Haake, That Water, Those Rocks: (A Novel)

“Desire is story itself.”
― Katharine Haake, That Water, Those Rocks: (A Novel)

“There is nothing that is not both narrative and language. Even the paradoxical physics by which the universe is held together is both. We are ourselves story, just as we are language. That is the nature of both narrative and love.”
― Katharine Haake, That Water, Those Rocks: (A Novel)

“Even as I learned to name the plants -- dogwood, five-fingered fern, mugwort -- I was stunned by the failure of language to reflect what I saw or felt.”
― Katharine Haake, That Water, Those Rocks: (A Novel)

“Story is revealed not in telling, but in listening.”
― Katharine Haake, That Water, Those Rocks: (A Novel)

“Numbers arrange themselves the way numbers will, just as a word will, a story.”
― Katharine Haake, That Water, Those Rocks: (A Novel)

“Poets dream of being archaeologists, as if their lives were sedimentary, like rocks. Poets don't mind getting down and dirty with the past.”
― Katharine Haake, That Water, Those Rocks: (A Novel)

“Maybe story is just for the assembling of things -- history, imagination, fact -- without which . . . our lives will dissipate, losing meaning and coherence.”
― Katharine Haake, That Water, Those Rocks: (A Novel)