The Shape of Water Quotes

“He can be the husband and father Hoyt’s dirty work has never permitted him to be. He can be a whole new man. He can be free.”

“The alarm shakes the bedside table. Without opening her eyes, Elisa feels for the clock’s ice-cold stopper. She’d been in a deep, soft, warm dream and wanted it back, one more tantalizing minute. But the dream eludes wakeful pursuit; it always does. There was water, dark water-that much she remembers. Tons of it, pressing at her, only she didn’t drown. She breathed inside it better, in fact, than she does here, in waking life, in drafty rooms, in cheap food, in sputtering electricity.”

“Her neck scars are a road map, too, aren’t they? Places she’s been best not to remember”

“She’d felt ragingly alive in the dream, but now she’s as inert as the eggs cooling on a plate. Ther’s a mirror her in the bedroom, too, but she chooses not to look at it, just in case her hunch is true and she’s invisible.”

“She sits on the bed to put them on. It is like a knight shoving his hands into a pair of steel gauntlets. As she wiggles the toe for fit, she lets her eyes stray across the slag heap of old LPs.”

“It is beyond belief what Bojangles does, which is why Elisa is ashamed to feel a burst of ego: She could have kept pace with him better than Shirley Temple, if only the world into which she’d been born had been wholly different.”

“Feet are what connect you to the ground, and when you are poor, none of that ground belongs to you.”

″‘The most intelligent of creatures,’ he offers softly, ‘often make the fewest sounds.‘”

“Time is against her, but she takes some of it anyway, carefully selecting Daisy-brand pumps with a blue leather flower on a clear plastic throat, as if the choice is of utmost importance. And it is. The Daisys will be the insurgency she brings off tonight, and every night.”

“Just do your job. The most advantageous feeling is to feel nothing at all.”

“It’s a craving that I indulge in. Can’t possibly be good for me, but nothing I like is.”

“I think this is some of my best work.”

“Go back out, knock, and then I’ll let you in. That’s the protocol, follow the protocol.”

“I dragged that filthy thing out of the river muck in South America, and along the way we didn’t get to like each other much. You may think that thing looks human, stands on two legs right? But we’re created in the Lord’s image. You don’t think that’s what the Lord looks like?”

“When he looks at me, the way he looks at me, he does not know what I lack or how I am incomplete. He sees me for what I am, as I am. He’s happy to see me every time, every day.”

“So what if he’s alone. We’re all alone.”

“I’m not a good lier. Except Brewster. It takes a lot of lies to keep a marriage going.”

“No names, no ranks. They just clean.”

“Doesn’t look like much of a god now.”

“Unable to perceive the shape of You, I find you all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with your love, it humbles my heart, for you are everywhere.