The River Between Us Time Quotes

All I knew of Dad's people was that they'd lived through the Civil War. Imagine an age when there were still people around who'd seen U. S. Grant with their own eyes, and men who'd voted for Lincoln. People you could reach out and touch. (1.6)

The paper was loose and peeling on the walls. I wondered how many layers you'd have to scrape away until you came to the time when these old people were young. If they ever were.

I wondered how quiet you'd have to be to hear the voices of those times. (1.51-52)

Oh, you can't picture how we lived back then. There wasn't but a string latch on the door. And we didn't have a stove of any description. I'd never seen one. We kindled fires with flint and steel and cooked over an open flame in the kitchen. We baked in a Dutch oven set into the bricks beside the hearth. In the winter we lived in this kitchen to keep warm. That's how it was with us. We didn't know any better. (3.4)

Delphine murmured what he was singing, though she never looked my way:

It is not everyone who knows
How to dance the old-time dances. (8.47)

There we are, trapped in time, Delphine and me on either side of Noah. I stare straight ahead from under the bird on my hat like I'm resigned to being shot at sunrise. I'd thrown back my veils, but Delphine didn't. She looks through them, forever a woman of mystery, and not quite sixteen. (13.3)

It was a steam calliope, so one of the warships had once been a showboat. It was playing a funeral dirge, "O Rest in the Lord." The sound of a showboat calliope sending this grieving music on ahead hung ever after in my mind. (13.18)

It was that summer of 1916 when my dad took me and my little brothers down home to see his folks. Time has a different shape in Grand Tower, Illinois, and so when we got there, Dad was "young Bill," and we were young Bill's boys. (15.1)

There we sat, both of us barefoot, while she brought back the old times for me. She handed over the past like a parcel, seizing these days to do it. (15.9)

At first I didn't know how to listen to tales that old. But we began to edge across the years toward each other, Grandma Tilly and I. (15.11)

I remember one more thing Grandma Tilly told me. She said that time was like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. She meant you could never go back. But of course we had. She'd taken me back. (15.37)