- Benjamin Honey surveyed his orchard in the cooling air and sharpening, iridescent, ocean-bent sunset light, the greens and purples deepening from their radiant flat day-bright into catacombs of shadowed fruit and limb and leaf. It felt as if his mother were somewhere among the rows. She might step from behind a tree in a white Sunday dress that took up the shifting light and colors and smile at him. He inhaled the perfume, salted, as everything on the island, and took a bite of the apple he held. (12)
- What was always so eerie about it afterward, Patience always said, what was so terrifying about it that made her bowels feel as if they'd turned to sand, was how quiet it all seemed, like a breath drawn and held, right before it hit, how breathtakingly fast but nearly silent and so just plain beautiful it was, all those people and trees and ships and horses cartwheeling past within the billows. 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. (18-19)
- It's still Apple Island! she screamed, sobbing the name over wind and wailing child and through her own wailing that now felt like it was erupting straight out of her heart, spouting form her in gouts as she searched in every direction for her children and their children. ... Benjamin Honey looked at his wife crying to him --fierce and true. But she was wrong. His orchard, so fair in appearance, was a folly; his half-remembered Eden no sooner restored than carried off by a little wind and rain. (23)
- ...had she lit the candle and seen the feasts and processions and births and murders, the ascensions and descents, the riots and adoring congregations all flared before her and around her, all with such depths the flickering candle light would have made the figures and animals seem to heave and surge and dance and stagger in the backgrounds each time the flame was brought directly in front of a section to see the movement clearly everything in it freezing still and everything in its periphery stirring and rising into obscure motion, and the levels reaching upward beyond the candle's light into the dark heights of the tree, she would have felt as if she'd been transported to some dim, flickering, otherworldly cathedral, creation itself as close as the cold tip of her nose and as prehistoric as the first breath that broke upon the waters. (35-36)
- The blossoms released their fading scents, as if in harmony with the last light inside the clouds and sky beneath which the island lingered in an eventide of peace, and off drifted the Larks, enflowered, ordained to the night. (43)
- 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. (48)
- He muttered about Noah and dead families buried in common graves and Grammy whispered to him, Hush, think of what a glorious month in heaven it must have been while it rained down here, all those people arriving, freed from all the evil their hearts had been set on since every one of them'd been little kids. (62)
- He rubbed the hatched water behind the two figures in the drawing and two carbon shadows appeared projected behind them on the carbon water, of carbon girls and the carbon baskets filled with the carbon berries they held above her heads. What kind of world would that be, in which a shadow was composed of the same stuff as the girl who cast it, and the blueberries she ate the same stuff as she? What if when I stood, my shadow was flesh and blood? What if berries were flesh and they grew on branches of arteries pulsing with blood and decked with leaves of skin? (80)
- Just, it's a fright looking down on us from the sky. (81)
- Since her child sleeps, she goes to the door of the shack and opens it slowly onto the night, as if she is trying not to be heard or seen by anyone. The island is dark before her. The ocean is dark beyond the island. The sky is overflowing with clusters of stars that rise from the dark horizon of the ocean and reach overhead and descend into the trees on the mainland behind her, where the setting half-moon blazes. Her eyes adjust and the island glows and the moon swathes the dark ocean in its reflected light. For the first time, she realizes that looking at the moonlight on the ocean is like looking at the sun through two mirrors. (88)
- The islanders were so used to diets of wind and fog, to meals of slow-roasted sunshine and poached storm clouds, so used to devouring sautéed shadows and broiled echoes; they found themselves stupefied by such an abundance of food and drink. For that evening it seemed to them as if they were sending Ethan off on all their behalves. And it seemed as if by sending him off to paint his beautiful pictures they all might somehow unhouse homelessness, might somehow bankrupt poverty. It seemed to all of them that evening as if they somehow might even starve hunger itself. (97)
- As he lowered into sleep the salty pined breeze and cricket songs and schools of stars poured into and birled around his brains so the night became his mind and his mind the night and the mother owl watching over him swooped down from her tree and through his dreams. (102)
- This boy before her, smoking his cigarette and looking at the sketch deciding it was done, seemed like a ghost, not because he was otherworldly or like a hallucination but because Bridget knew that she would remember this moment for however long she lived in its perfect entirety --the grass, the sunlight, the blue cloud of smoke, the tedder and the windrows and the mowing men, this boy she found more and more beautiful-- and she could already feel what it was going to be like to look back on it and remember the young girl she'd once been and the young boy who'd stood right in front of her and whisked a stick of charcoal around and nearly miraculously rendered the grass, the light, the mowers, the windrows, the huge, heavy, volumed, shadowed, sunny, swarming, monolithic stacks of hay --everything she saw and anticipated remembering-- onto a white pane of paper exactly as it looked to her own eyes. (118)
- He thought, you could paint her and look at her as much as you liked. (119)
- Bridget lifted the pitcher with one hand still behind her back, which made her look formal, and Ethan saw she was flustered and blushing and he felt his own cheeks heat again. Bridget poured lemonade into each glass and it sounded sharp, cold, etched, spilling over then flooding the ice. She handed a glass to Ethan and as it passed from her hand to his he had the sense that, except for the charcoal on his hand, he could mistake Bridget's hand for his own. (124)
- Lemonade, and ice through the summer, a house bigger than twenty houses, Dutchmen mowing huge, rolling meadows, this girl from over the ocean, so lovely, so kind to him, this dream, this strange dream, this huge, addled dream of a kingdom so far from Apple Island. (125)
- No, not me; I'm queer. I'm queer for my self, for my self hood, queer for this queer self I find myself to be, queer with strange appetites, 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 --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. (172)
- Earth is this surface. Earth is this solid stratum. Earth is the hole or hiding place of burrowing animals. Earth is the soil suitable for cultivation. Earth is the medium by which a circuit is completed. Earth is the ground. Earth is a place for burial. Earth is the present abode of humankind. Earth is wordless and patient and suffered the grave robbers' spades in silence. (218)
aug 13 2023 ∞
aug 13 2023 +