This Other Eden Quotes

“and a heart that throbs most queerly. I’m queer for other queers, queer for their shapes and colors and sizes, queer for their tastes. I’m queer for the ruthless sea. I’m queer for all the little queer creatures in the tide pools. I’m queer for the light when it breaks the horizon and queer for it when it sinks behind the trees. I’m plain queer for these people and queer for this world. I’m downright queer in love with this wreck of a world, queer in love with love itself—love’s always queer, always arriving in our hearts from queer nowheres, queering everything—and there we are; wide awake all night, queer as queer can be; queer orphans, queer widows, queer boys, and queer girls; sorrel girls queer for ivory boys, daffodil boys queer for lilac girls; carmine girls queer for sable girls, cinnamon boys so very queer for boys of bluest milk. Wicked shepherds! Burn me at the stake and hang me from a tree. Clap me in the stocks; send me down the mine; set me in the burning fields. But I am queer. And I say, Here is water, bread, a dull penny. Here’re my old shirt, my plane and hammer, a roof I’ll help you raise above your head. Here is my queer old body, in a barn, behind a hedge, beneath a shadow, on a bare pallet—”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Other ideas still, though, were darker, underwater, or he underwater and they above the surface, clear and sharp and focused. He could hear them in his head, feel their weight in his chest and their shapes in his throat, but he was slow of tongue and they went unworded. He knew everyone had the same kind of ideas, but that his thoughts outdistanced his words sooner than with other people—even the words for what he meant when he thought about this hovered above the water—dark, familiar circling birds he could not name.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Lawyers are filing documents. Judges are signing orders. Scientist and doctors are collating data. Pharaoh’s heart is as hard as ever.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“The sound of the ocean is like deep, planetary breathing, strong abiding.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Eha sits on the keg inside a sphere of retracted sound and time, contemplating every piece of the house he and Zachary Hand to God fashioned and put together, comprehending its whole anatomy as it hangs before him, plosive, cubic, dissembled, perfectly projected. And,”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Eha had been bewildered by the woods. He was used to the openness of the island and the ocean and the sky. The huge quiet still trees seemed alive and as if they were conferring, about lofty old secrets a hundred feet above, secrets they’d been discussing for ages before he intruded and would continue to ponder for ages after he’d long been gone. Like the sea, the woods felt older than he could possibly imagine. Whereas he knew the sea, though, he knew nothing about the woods and felt his presence register with them as that of a stranger, trespassing.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“quick—while the murderous king still sleeps. Here is a song, a painting, a jig and a reel. Here is an island for an apple, an orchard for an eye. Here is a single, perfect apple for an island.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Queer Squatters of Apple Island! Queer of Spades! he thought. (His friend the old widower he’d known since the war had told him about the article in the paper and the postcards in the general store.) That’s right; I am queer, from queer folk, queer stock. The very queerest. Here we are, stuck on an island, a hollow, a swamp, the desert, no sooner settled than banished again. You bet I’m queer. I’m no landlord nor lawyer, no duke nor lord of the looms. I’m no cap doffer, no knee bender, no flattering stooge. I draw no writs; I pass no judgments. I set no seals. I tip no scales. No, not me; I’m queer. I’m queer for my self, for my selfhood, queer for this queer self I find myself to be, queer with strange appetites,”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“For the first time, she realizes that looking at the moonlight on the ocean is like looking at the sun through two mirrors.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Instructing Ethan how to split cedar shingles was easy. One, two, three. Froe, split, turn, froe, flip. Like a song. Like”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Sweet Jesus! Christ harrowed hell for you?”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“I'm downright queer in love with this wreck of a world, queer in love with love itself—love's always queer, always arriving in our hearts from queer nowheres, queering everything—and there we are; wide awake all night, queer as queer can be; queer orphans queer widows, queer boys, and queer girls; sorrel girls queer for ivory boys, daffodil boys queer for lilac girls; carmine girls queer for sable girls, cinnamon boys so very queer for boys of bluest milk.

Wicked shepherds! Burn me at the stake and hang me from a tree. Clap me in the stocks; send me down the mine; set me in the burning fields. But I am queer.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Soon enough, she thought. Soon enough, Pharaoh will come after us, like he always does.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“He struck a match against the barn door and touched it to the end of the cigarette and drew his breath as if to pull the flame through the tobacco and paper into his mouth and over his tongue and down his throat, as if it were fire itself with which he meant to fill his lungs.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“The graves where the island dead once lay are open and empty and listen like ears.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“He looked like a threadbare angel abandoning the wrecked ship over which he’d once been guardian.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Earth is wordless and patient and suffered the grave robbers’ spades in silence.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“The Dutchmen worked in a meadow of waves, scything the tide, mowing breakers, reaping the hissing, carbonated grass.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“To embrace hope is good; not so hope’s endless disappointments.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“The paupers looked like not just castaways but deportees from another century, the refugees of another century’s misfortunes recrudescing into this one. They looked like apparitions, phantoms standing on the strand, indistinct as sand blowing over sand, ghosts sighted on some shipwrecked expedition to the top of the world.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Boxes and basket and chests and bureaus and vaults and iron safes crammed with jewels and rings and pendants and sacrificial silver daggers and stone altars and bills of sale for continents and oceans and nations and human beings, even the moon, and the sunlight reflecting off it, in languages he could not read and it was all to his humiliation…”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Scolding herself comforts her because she hears her mother’s voice when she does.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Their family on the island was always so small and seemingly getting smaller, compacting, members converging into one another, so few of them they’d begun to be more than one relation to one another at a time, men being their daughters’ fathers and husbands, too, mothers being their sons’ sisters. The family condensing, imploding, fewer and fewer people, becoming heavier and heavier, until one last woman would stand, dark and wholly compacted, herself begat, she her own mother.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“She had had to practice not to address her father’s ghost when she saw it.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“What a sight it would have been, Ester thought, looking at the island as if it were slipping away and not she, to see that last, self-begotten woman, darker than pure dark, heavier than the whole world, standing on the bluff, and what a sight to see the island give way beneath her, as if to her impossible weight granite and bedrock suddenly could give no more support than a silk scarf to a statue cast in lead, plunging from the spangled sparkling surface back into the lightless pith of the only womb left strong enough to bear her away to her next and truest birth. She knew how holy it was that only one family went into the ark and came forth from it. And she knew how terrible it was, too.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“This little earth, hung somewhere deep in the fathomless heavens.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“It was like the prophets in the Bible. They didn’t have any special powers of seeing the future. They saw where the present was at, was all.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“…and the moans of all the other souls crammed into the ship became louder than the thundering sea as the ship thudded through a portless eternity…”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Why have you come home, Bridget? Why have you come back to us from the water.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“The bottom of the lowering sun punctured on the pine treetops and its light splintered across the yard.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden