Gold Dust Quotes

“Da Souza himself felt unwanted, left behind in this ghost town of a place, among the empty houses, with a wife and three children to support on the proceeds from a store where nobody shopped any more.”

″‘Don’t be sillier than you were born,’ said Inez with patient scorn. ‘Enoque and Honorio are garimpeiros. They’re gold-miners. It’s all they know about. They don’t have a brain between them to do anything else.’ ‘Then they’re mining for gold!’

″‘A fine woman. A cultured woman,’ they said, but were glad it was their children and not they who had to spend each day in the classroom. The Ferretti voice rang out across the empty town, like a tocsin bell announcing the outbreak of battle: Senhora Ferretti’s battle against Ignorance.”

“Picked in a rage, her salads contained increasingly strange ingredients: nettles and geraniums, gum wrappers blown off the street, clothes pegs fallen off the washing line.”

“But even Inez could not discount the obvious. Enoque and Honorio were digging for gold outside the shop.”

″‘Couldn’t Great-Grandma have used the names again, once the children were dead?’ asked Inez, being practical. ‘And how would brother and sister be told apart in Heaven, may I ask? And the bad luck! Consider the bad luck!‘”

“Gold. A funny thing, really, for the world to place such value on, thought Inez vaguely. Something lying about in the ground. Why not something hard to come by? Something men had to climb up high for...”

“Inez thought [the Baby] must be searching for a name, since Mrs. da Souza would not give it one. Mrs. da Souza considered it a waste to name a child before knowing whether it would survive.”

“Her anger had begun with the failure of the mountain, but had grown so great that it no longer needed reasons to overspill. (‘She is not angry with you,’ their father used to whisper to Maro and Inez last thing at night. But it was sometimes hard to believe.)

“In those days we had everything. Everything a man could want. Even things to complain about. Before the mountain failed.”