The Animal Family Quotes

“The days went by for him, all different and all the same. The boy was happy, and yet he didn't know that he was happy, exactly: he couldn't remember having been unhappy. If one day as he played at the edge of the forest some talking bird had flown down and asked him: "Do you like your life" he would not have known what to say, but would have asked the bird: "Can you not like it?”
― Randall Jarrell, The Animal Family: A Newbery Honor Award Winner

“In spring the meadow that ran down from the cliff to the beach was all foam-white and sea-blue with flowers; the hunter looked at it and it was beautiful. But when he came home there was no one to tell what he had seen―and if he picked the flowers and brought them home in his hands, there was no one to give them to. And when at evening, past the dark blue shape of a far-off island, the sun sank under the edge of the sea like a red world vanishing, the hunter saw it all, but there was no one to tell what he had seen.

One winter night, as he looked at the stars that, blazing coldly, made the belt and the sword of the hunter Orion, a great green meteor went slowly across the sky. The hunter's heart leaped, he cried: "Look, look!" But there was no one to look.”
― Randall Jarrell, The Animal Family

“One day is one wave, and the next day the next, for the sea people―and whether they're glad or whether they're sorry, the sea washes it away. When my sister died, the next day I'd forgotten and was happy. But if you died, if he died, my heart would break.

When it storms for the people, no matter how terribly it storms, the storm isn't real―swim down a few strokes and it's calm there, down there it's always calm. And death is not different, if it's someone else who dies. We say. 'Swim away from it'; we swim away from everything.

But on land it's different. The storm's real here, and the red leaves, and the branches when they're bare all winter. It all changes and never stops changing, and I'm here with nowhere to swim to, no way ever to leave it or forget it. No, the land's better! The land's better!”
― Randall Jarrell, The Animal Family

“She helped the hunter with the cooking as a husband helps his wife: when he had gone out to hunt and left something to stew, she would take the pot off the fire. But she never knew when to take it off; sometimes it was cooked to pieces, and she never got it right except by accident. But when the accident happened the hunter would laugh and say, "You're as good a cook as my mother!" After all, why should he want her to keep house? If you have a seal that could talk, would you want it to sweep the floor?”
― Randall Jarrell, The Animal Family

“The days went by for him, all different and all the same. The boy was happy, and yet he didn't know that he was happy, exactly; he couldn't remember having been unhappy. If one day as he played at the edge of the forest some talking bird had flown down and asked him: "Do you like your life?" he would not have known what to say, but would have asked the bird: "Can you not like it?”
― Randall Jarrell, The Animal Family

“For a long time, whenever the hunter took off his clothes, she would laugh as if he were
playing a trick on her, something magical but ridiculous. He would explain to her how useful and beautiful clothes are; she listened, always, with the same willing doubtful smile. She would have liked to be fooled, but it was more than she could manage; the hunter was the one clothed thing in a naked world.”
― Randall Jarrell, The Animal Family

“... Whenever anything reminded the hunter of his father and mother, you could see that he missed them and longed to have them alive again. The mermaid would tell him about her childhood and her family and her sister, the dead one, but she never seemed to want any of it back. The hunter said, puzzled: "Don't you wish your sister were still here?"
The mermaid answered: "She was then. Why do you want her to be now too?”
― Randall Jarrall, The Animal Family

“The hunter and the mermaid were so different from each other that it seemed to them, finally, that they were exactly alike; and they lived together and were happy.”
― Randall Jarrell, The Animal Family