Blackwater Quotes

“All deaths are sudden, no matter how gradual the dying may be.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

“Southerners are an easygoing race when it comes to aberrations of conduct. They will react with anger if something out of the ordinary is presented as a possible future occurrence; but if an unusual circumstance is discovered to be an established fact, they will usually accept it without rancor or judgment as part of the normal order of things.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

“she hates that levee the way you and I hate hell and the Republicans.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

“What he did know was that Elinor was very much like his mother: strong-willed and dominant, wielding power in a fashion he could never hope to emulate. That was the great misconception about men: because they dealt with money, because they could hire someone on and later fire him, because they alone filled state assemblies and were elected congressional representatives, everyone thought they had power. Yet all the hiring and firing, the land deals and the lumber contracts, the complicated process for putting through a constitutional amendment—these were only bluster. They were blinds to disguise the fact of men’s real powerlessness in life. Men controlled the legislatures, but when it came down to it, they didn’t control themselves. Men had failed to study their own minds sufficiently, and because of this failure they were at the mercy of fleeting passions; men, much more than women, were moved by petty jealousies and the desire for petty revenges. Because they enjoyed their enormous but superficial power, men had never been forced to know themselves the way that women, in their adversity and superficial subservience, had been forced to learn about the workings of their brains and their emotions.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

“Is Zaddie Sapp deformed because she was born with black skin?” “Of course not—” “Are Grace and Lucille deformed because they have given up men and live out at Gavin Pond Farm together?” “No, Mama, that’s not—” “That’s how they were born, darling! Zaddie was born with black skin and Grace Caskey was born to dote on girls, and just because they’re different, do you think Creola Sapp should have said, ‘I’m not going to give birth to this child’? Do you think Genevieve and James should have said, ‘We don’t want a little baby if she’s not going to grow up to be just like everybody else in this town’?”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

“Somebody might start to take you serious, and lift your chin with a rifle barrel. Lift it right through the top of your damned head.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Saga

“Men have no business getting married. Men just cause women trouble, that’s all they’re good for.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Saga

“Elinor’s house, Queenie’s house, and Lucille and Grace’s farm were all perverted and incomplete reflections of that perfect image.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Saga

“Once Grace raised her paddle high and brought it down swiftly on a water moccasin gliding past them. It was not because they were in danger, but she followed the general philosophy that poisonous things, like gentlemen who made proposals of marriage, ought to be beaten over the head.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Saga

“Oh, Lord, no!” Elinor laughed gaily. “Oscar, I’ve already had a little party for the levee.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Saga

“«Quindi esistono davvero creature che ti mangiano?»
«Non in questo ripostiglio» rispose sua madre, con inquietante evasività.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater

“Even the servants seemed to have been affected by the Caskey women’s assumption of power. Zaddie, Ivey, Roxie, and Luvadia did and said what they saw fit to do and say.”
― Michael McDowell, Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga