River Sing Me Home Quotes

“And yet, love did not wait. Love was there in the beginning—even before the beginning. Love needed no words, no introduction. Existence was enough.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“The connection between all things. That we can’t just take; we must also give.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“Because someone help me when me need it. And you should not take help if you not gon’ give it when the time comes.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“But it’s nice to do things the slow way. It give you time to think.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“Hope led you to dream things that could not be, like freedom wrestled from the white man’s unwilling hands, or a family reunited.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“So there was something about the passing of a parent. A cosmic weight that shifted onto the generation below. A child could leave the world without a whisper, but a parent's death made itself known.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“Their story was their own, and there was none like it, before or since. But she also felt the thousands of other threads, the collective weaving together of all lives.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“The not knowing is what hurt me. That’s what slavery take from me—me did not know. Me did not know where me pickney was.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“This was the real power of slavery, the long shadow it could cast after its formal end—that even with all this distance between her and Providence, Rachel still lived in fear.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“We all got our gifts—the things we see that others can’t. All we can do is use them when the time come.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“They knew what it was to search for something – to be exhausted, bent double by the weight of loss, but somehow still crawling on their knees, hands outstretched, fumbling in the dark to find the pieces of whatever had been shattered.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“When they sang, we heard them. We sang with them, and welcomed this new life into a world that is cruel, but that has love in it, too, if you know where to look. This is how we are remembered. In snatches of song, in dreams, in the smile that passes between mother and child. These are the parts of us that cannot be destroyed. These are the parts of us that feed the roots, and keep them strong. The soil is fertile. Our tree grows on.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“Mary Grace lifted her eyes to the sky, perhaps to where she felt her God would be. Rachel did the same, even though she did not believe in a sky-god. She felt that if any god or gods existed, they would be diffused throughout everything and everyone on earth, neither benevolent nor malign, but simply existing, drawing everything together, living and dead. But the sky was beautiful that evening, and for a moment the whole village cast their gaze to the heavens and let the last of the sunlight bathe them in God’s love.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“As Tituba finished her song, Kamu, the other Indian man, went into his hut and brought out a drum. He replaced the steady melody with a fast drumbeat that soon had the whole village jumping, twisting, clapping and laughing. Here was a language they all spoke, that needed no words. Mary Grace, spinning out of Nobody’s arms into the center of the crowd, spoke loudest of all, letting her body say what her mouth could not.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“Every freedom had its price.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“Freedom mean something different to me. The search, that is freedom.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“This is why me don't like to do it... Think about the past. The memories too painful. The hope hurt. All I want to do is live the life in front of me, because it's a miracle me make it here.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“The true story of Mother Rachael inspired the journey of Rachel in this novel.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“Time not on the scale of the long, dragging minutes cutting cane in the hot sun. Not even on the scale of the seasons, from harvest to planting and back again. Time on the scale of generations, which could span hundreds of years.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“If the village was an ending place, a place of rest, he was just as much at home in it as the others. It was just that, for him, the ending could be found at the beginning, by tracing time back to those first ten years before he was shackled and stuffed into the belly of a ship bound for the New World.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“Since she had left the plantation, Rachel had felt, more than ever, that she was made of memories. They were the currency that she traded with the people she encountered on her journey—with Mama B, with the Armstrongs, with Quamina and the runaways. They sustained her. They were the essence of her quest to move backward in time, to recapture what had been lost, to make whole what had been smashed.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“living by Mama B’s philosophy: the connection between all things.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“there was something about the passing of a parent. A cosmic weight that shifted onto the generation below. A child could leave the world without a whisper, but a parent’s death made itself known.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“Hope led you to dream things that could not be, like freedom wrestled from the white man's unwilling hands, or a family reunited..”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“The feeling of complete, absorbing, unqualified love. The baby was a stranger, without speech, unknowable. It would be years before he could say what was on his mind. And yet, love did not wait. Love was there in the beginning--even before the beginning. Love needed no words, no introduction. Existence was enough.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“The connection between all things. That we can’t just take; we must also give.” Mama B, too, touched the place on the tree where the bark had been peeled away. “All healing start from there.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“As we excavate history through fiction, we can confront the injustices of our past as a way to shed light on our present and work toward a more equitable future.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“The act of compelling her body to exert itself for a purpose of her choosing, rather than for the profit of a master, was exhilarating.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“Rachel had always been confused by the lengths to which white men would go for the sake of possession.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home

“There was freedom in this new kind of smallness, an exhilarating sense that she was in the world, and not just passing through it at a white man’s pace.”
― Eleanor Shearer, River Sing Me Home