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

“The first international congress on eugenics is taking place this month in London, England. In his opening remarks, Major Leonard Darwin, son of the famous Charles Darwin, spoke of the dangers of interfering with Nature’s ways.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“It wasn’t silent, really, but more, so loud it was too big to hear. I could not hear it for that second, because it was just too big a sound for my ears to hear.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“WISH CHALK TASTED like white snaps when I bite white sticks or unhappy man clicks white sticks on black wall and makes white bugs and white chalk clicks like a white click bug in a click white bush. Honey is bitter to the wicked, acid sweet.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Her compounds were spare and vaporous, essences distilled, brewed, steeped, reduced, concentrated into drops and small thimblefuls, by a medicine woman who herself mostly survived on pipe smoke, black tea, ocean air, and the Word of God. She concocted salves salutary to lean lives lived on shallow soil and bare rock.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“THERE WERE THREE DOGS on the island, too—a maniacal little terrier called Fitzy that single-handedly kept the island nearly free of rats; a gigantic, imperturbable brindled mastiff named Grizzly, who had the habits of fetching the island children from the water whether they liked it or not and sometimes gently sitting on them when he thought they were being naughty or too mean toward one another; and a friendly but emotionally fragile mutt with brown body, black mask, and white socks, called Sulky, that if spoken to sharply went off in a huff and found a corner and stared at it for an hour.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“So, here is another arrival on our little island, Esther thought. Our little island on this little earth. This little earth, hung somewhere deep in the fathomless heavens. Here is another arrival—this girl, this child— ripening within her own body the seed of another arrival, another child, each and every life comprehensive, each peculiar, each priceless, and each less than the shadow of a shadow, all cherished or despised, celebrated or aggrieved, memorialized or entirely forgotten.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“She expected looking at the portrait would be like looking into the mirror, but she came around the easel and saw the painted girl and it was like a mallet striking her heart and like her heart was a bronze gong inside her ribs and its sounding somehow unstrung and remade her. She did not see herself. She saw how she was seen. The painted girl’s face seemed stark, stripped, her skin pink here, white there, be-freckled here, be-pimpled there, porcelain here, pebbly there, her pale forehead in shadow beneath the hat she wore, her coral nose flushed by the sun. Bridget saw the girl’s skull, her bones beneath her skin and muscles. The”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“I hope there’s a boy and a girl on that planet right there—that’s Saturn; I think it’s Saturn—I hope there’re a boy and a girl looking at the fleck of light in their sky that they think is Earth, talking about how they hope there’s a boy and girl there talking about them.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“The vastness of the house lent the sense of being confined. Ethan felt like it was a huge galleon, its cargo the piled, stacked, stuffed, heaped riches, the intricate, rarefied, exquisite treasure of people who would be like gods, riding out some flood with all the riches of their court, like in the history books Mr. Diamond had taught, the boat laden, low in the water under weight of gold and precious stones and armor and boxes and baskets 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 and he needed fresh air, to be outside because it was as if Bridget led him belowdecks, as if he could hear cross timbers flexing and bracing bolts shooting into their staples behind him and the ocean squeezing the hull more tightly and feel himself heading toward the deepest, narrowest, tightest, most airless space where he would be shackled and forced to lie on his side and pant for breath and alternately roast and freeze and rub against the raw planking until his skin began to strip away 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

“but in the sense of being oblivious to the greater, probably utter, catastrophe into which the, yes, artless graciousness of bringing the school and lessons would draw them all.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“old enough to have come to the island as a very young man in January of 1866 after the war ended and after the 29th Connecticut Colored Infantry Regiment he’d fought in had been decommissioned because he’d heard about the island from one of the Virginians he’d fought alongside who’d said his father had known a man named Honey a long time ago who it was said had gone north and founded an all colored town on an island. Zachary had lived his entire life on Apple Island since then.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Mr. Diamond, Violet said without taking her eyes off the alarmed doctor, you’re a good man as far as it goes, but your letters ain’t worth balls on a ewe, pardon me, and I’m going to write a busted jaw right on this cute flatlander’s face, and she feigned another lunge at the doctor.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“as she closed her eyes she dropped like a diver in a bell into the depths of sleep.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Dear Jesus, give me patience. And strength. Patience and strength to get through this, so I can get them through this.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Bridget wiped tears from her eyes and gasped a little laugh. To think how closely, with how much care, how much courtesy and gentleness he had looked at her.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“Ethan leaned closer and closer to the painting, trying to see how it was possible, to see how the painter had turned a handful of plants into an emblem for the whole world.”
― Paul Harding, This Other Eden

“feel himself heading toward the deepest, narrowest, tightest, most airless space where he would be shackled and forced to lie on his side and pant for breath and alternately roast and freeze and rub against the raw planking until his skin began to strip away 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