Jacob Have I Loved Events Quotes

I love Rass Island, although for much of my life, I did not think I did, and it is a pure sorrow to me that, once my mother leaves, there will be no one left there with the name of Bradshaw. But th...

Call was a year older than I and would never have gone crabbing with a girl except that his father was dead, so he had no man to take him on board a regular crab boat. He was, as well, a boy who ha...

There is a rare snapshot of the two of us sitting on the front stoop the summer we were a year and a half old. Caroline is tiny and exquisite, her blonde curls framing a face that is glowing with l...

She was so sure, so present, so easy, so light and gold, while I was all gray and shadow. I was not ugly or monstrous. That might have been better. Monsters always command attention, if only for th...

[Caroline's] was the first head out of the opening, wrapped against the wind in a sky blue scarf. Just enough of her hair had escaped to make her look fresh and full like a girl in a cigarette ad....

Now that the strange old man was there, the house was no longer empty, and the whole island was trying to unravel the mystery. All the old people agreed that Hiram Wallace was in his youth the hope...

I would come in from a day of progging for crab, sweating and filthy. Caroline would remark mildly that my fingernails were dirty. How could they be anything else but dirty? But instead of simply a...

Nothing went right for me that summer, unless you count the fact that when my periods began, almost a year after Caroline's of course, they began on a Sunday morning before I left the house for chu...

Even I, wanting so much to believe, could tell it was mimeographed. The only thing typed in was my name, and that had been misspelled. I was a fool, but I'm proud to say, not that big a fool. Heart...

"Kill them? You mean kill them all?" "They're almost starving now, Sara Louise. They'll die slowly with no one to care for them." "I'll take care of them," I said fiercely. "I'll feed them until Au...

Just before noon Call came by and asked if Caroline or I was going down to the Captain's. "Sure," said Caroline cheerfully. "Soon as we finish carrying the canning upstairs." High water had more th...

But even if he never told a soul, how was I to face him again? Just thinking of his smell, his feel, his hands, made my body go hot all over. "He's older than your grandmother," I kept saying to my...

My mental project that fall was a study of all the hands of the classroom. It was my current theory that hands were the most revealing part of the human body—far more significant than eyes. For e...

Caroline kept the Jergens Lotion incident to herself, so no one else suspected that I was going crazy. I kept the knowledge locked within myself, taking it out from time to time to admire in secret...

The Captain sat between Caroline and me. While the congregation recited the Twenty-third Psalm—"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for thou art wi...

I suppose people were a little afraid of me. I must have been a strange sight, always dressed in men's work clothes, my hands as rough and weathered as the sides of the crab house where I worked. (...

When I put on my Sunday dress, which I hadn't worn for almost two years, it strained across my breasts and shoulders. I could hardly bring myself to look in the mirror, first at my brown face and t...

"You can do anything you want to. I've known that from the first day I met you—at the other end of my periscope." "But—" "What is it you really want to do?" I was totally blank. What was it I r...

Did I see her flinch, ever so slightly? "What do you want us to do for you, Louise?" "Let me go. Let me leave!" "Of course you may leave. You never said before you wanted to leave." And, oh, my ble...

A mountain-locked valley is more like all island than anything else I know. Our water is the Appalachian wilderness, our boats, the army surplus jeeps we count on to navigate our washboard roads an...

My own breasts were swollen with milk for Truitt. I knew his father would bring him to me soon, but there was plenty. I took my baby out of the oven and held her mouth to catch the milk, which bega...