Sara Louise Bradshaw Quotes

“She came round where I could see her, her arms halfway stretched out as though she would have liked to embrace me but dared not. I jumped aside. Did I think her touch would taint me? Somehow infect me with the weakness I perceived in her? ‘You could have done anything, been anything you wanted.’ ‘But I am what I wanted to be,’ she said letting her arms fall to her sides. ‘I chose. No one made me become what I am.‘”

″‘Call,’ I would say, watching dawn break crimson over the Chesapeake Bay, ‘I hope I have a sky like this the day I get married.’ ‘Who would marry you?’ Call would ask, not meanly, just facing facts.”

“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 their freakishness. My parents would have wrung their hands and tried to make it up to me, as parents will with a handicapped or especially ugly child. Even Call, his nose too large for his small face, had a certain satisfactory ugliness.”

″‘Jacob have I loved …’ Suddenly my stomach flipped. Who was speaking? I couldn’t remember the passage. Was it Isaac, the father of the twins? No, even the Bible said that Isaac had favored Esau. Rebecca, the mother, perhaps? It was her conniving that helped Jacob steal the blessing from his brother. Rebecca—I had hated her from childhood, but somehow I knew that these were not her words...”

“But I had never caused my parents, ‘a minute’s worry.’ Didn’t they know that worry proves you care?”

“All my dreams of leaving, but beneath them I was afraid to go. I had clung to them, to Rass, yes, even to my grandmother, afraid that if I loosened my fingers an iota, I would find myself once more cold and clean in a forgotten basket.”

″‘So. What’s Miss Caroline got to say for herself these days?’ Call’s face flamed in pleasure. It was the question he had been bursting to answer. ‘She—she said, ‘Yes.’ I knew, of course, what he meant. There was no need to press him to explain. But something compelled me to hear my own doom spelled out. ‘Yes’ to what?′ I asked.”

“What my mother bore him was girls, twin girls. I was the elder by a few minutes. I always treasured the thought of those minutes. They represented the only time in my life when I was the center of everyone’s attention. From the moment Caroline was born, she snatched it all for herself. ”

″‘I think I seen every island in the world,’ he said. ‘And you come home to the prettiest one of all,’ I answered. ‘Yeah,’ he said, but his focus blurred for a moment. ‘The water’s about to get her, Wheeze.’ ‘Only a bit, to the south,’ I said defensively. ‘Wheeze, open your eyes,’ he said. ‘In two years I’ve been gone, she’s lost at least an acre. Another good storm—’ It wasn’t right. He should have been more loyal. You don’t come home after two years away and suddenly inform your mother that she’s dying.”

“Hate. That was the forbidden word. I hated my sister. I, who belonged to a religion which taught that simply to be angry with another made one liable to the judgment of God and that to hate was the equivalent of murder.”