The Water Dancer Quotes

“...it was never the costume that made the Quality, but how the lady wore it.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“It was mine by blood. I was correct, but not in the sense I thought.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“I went down the line like this until I held a clutch of stories in my head, so many that no one else could remember who has said what and what the particular details were.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“I was certain my father saw things as I did, and I wondered how wrong it must have felt to see the best of you emerge in this way, in the place you didn't expect, indeed in the place your whole world depends on it never appearing.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“But she needed a husband because Virginia still operated on the code of gentlemen, meaning there were still things beyond her, places she could not go, deals she could not be party to. And so those two needed each other--Maynard an intelligent partner to save his land and estate, Corrine a gentleman to represent her interests.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“But what did it mean to find me, a slave, dreaming amid those books?”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“Almost any tasking man at Lockless would have traded his life for mine. But there was a weight of being so close to them, the weight that Thena had tried to warn me about, but something more, the crushing weight of seeing how the Quality truly lived, in all their luxury, and how much they really took from us.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“It was not only anger in me. I was nineteen, and a guarded nineteen who'd worked to feel nothing in this direction, so that when I did feel it, right there in that moment, when I did feel that I loved her, it was not with reason or ritual, nor the way that makes families and homes, but the way that wrecks them, I was undone.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“They could have done anything to us out there, done anything to her, for this was the normal path of things. It was the necessary right of the Low, who held no property in man, to hold momentary property in those who ran, and to vent all their awful passions upon them.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

“We have our own world down here--our own ways of being and talking and laughing, even if you don't see me doing much of neither. But I got a choice down here. And it ain't great, but it is ours. Up there, with them right over you... well, it's different.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates