The Color of Water quotes. Pages 1-107.
1. “Rachel Shilsky is dead as far as I’m concerned. She had to die in order for me, the rest of me, to live” (2).
2. “The image of her riding that bicycle typified her whole existence to me. Her oddness, her
complete nonawareness of what the world thought of her, a nonchalance in the face of what
I perceived to be imminent danger from blacks and whites who disliked her for being a
white person in a black world” (8).
3. “I noticed that Mommy stood apart from other mothers, rarely speaking to them” (12).
4. “She’d quickly grasp my hand as I stepped off the bus, ignoring the stares of the black
women as she whisked me away” (12).
5. “You need to read up on it because I ain’t no expert. They got folks who write whole books about it, go find
them and ask them! Or read the Bible! Shoot! Who am I? I ain’t nobody! I can’t be telling the world this! I
don’t know!” (17).
6. “Even as a girl I was a runner. I liked to get out of the house and go. Run” (17).
7. “My siblings and I spent hours playing tricks and teasing one another. It was out way of
dealing with realities over which we had no control” (22).
8. “There was something inside me, an ache I had, like a constant itch that got bigger and
bigger as I grew, that told me. It was in my blood, you might say, and however the notion
got there, it bothered me greatly” (23).
9. “Because even as a child I had a clear sense that black and white folks did not get along,
which put her, and us, in a pretty tight space” (25).
10. “But there was part of me that feared black power very deeply for the obvious reason. I
thought black power would be the end of my mother. I had swallowed the white man’s fear
of the Negro, as we were called back then, whole” (27).
11. “She insisted on absolute privacy, excellent school grades, and trusted no outsiders of either
race” (27).
12. “Mommy’s house was an entire world that she created” (27).
13. “Yet conflict was a part of our lives, written into our very faces, hands, and arms, and to see
how contradiction lived and survived in its essence, we had to look no farther than our own
mother” (29).
14. “I was ashamed of my mother, but see, love didn’t come natural to me until I became a Christian” (38).
15. “I’m only telling you this because you’re my son and I want you to know the truth and nothing else” (43).
16. “Mommy’s tears seemed to come from somewhere else, a place far away, a place inside her
that she never let any of us children visit, and even as a boy I felt there was pain behind
them” (50).
17. “He cleaned that gun more than he cleaned his own trousers, and he had it ready for anyone who tried to fool
with his money” (59).
18. “I still know those verses, but I learned them out of…not out of love for God but just out of…what? I don’t
know. Duty” (63).
19. “My brothers and sisters were my best friends, but when it came to food, they were my
enemies” (66).
20. “If you were the first to grab the purse when she got home, you ate. If you missed it, well,
sleep tight” (67).
21. “A solitary toothbrush would cover five sets of teeth and gums” (68).
22. “Cursing in my house was not allowed. Cursing was out of bounds. Cursing meant things
were out of control” (75).
23. “I was almost grown before I could eat meat. The sight of my father plunging his knife into that cow was
enough to make me avoid it for years. I was afraid of my father. He put the fear of God in me” (80).
24. “But I used the name Ruth around other white fold, because it didn’t sound so Jewish, though it never
stopped the other kids from teasing me” (80).
25. “I never starved for food till I got married. But I was starving in another way. I was starving for love and
affection. I didn’t get none of that” (83).
26. “Yet there was a part of me that recognized Jews as slightly different from other white folks,
partly through Mommy, who consciously and unconsciously sought many things Jewish, and
partly through my elder siblings” (86).
27. “‘If you’re a nobody,’ she said dryly, ‘it doesn’t matter what color you are’” (92).
28. “The question of race was like the power of the moon in my house. It’s what made the river
flow, the ocean swell and the tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable,
indisputable, and thus completely ignorable” (94).
29. “We did not consider ourselves poor or deprived, or depressed, for the rules of the outside
world seemed meaningless to us as children” (95).
30. “But as we grew up and fanned out into the world as teenagers and college students, we
brought the outside world home with us, and the world that Mommy had so painstakingly
created began to fall apart” (95).
31. “He was that kind of kid, absentminded, and very smart, and later in life he became a
chemist. But to the cops, he was just another black perpetrator with a story, and he was
arrested and jailed” (97).
32. “She was, in retrospect, quite brilliant when it came to manipulating us. She depended
heavily on the ‘king/queen system’…the king/queen system gave us a sense of order, rank,
and self” (98).
33. “As I walked home, holding Mommy’s hand while she fumed, I thought it would be easier if
we were one color, black or white. I didn’t want to be white. My siblings had already instilled
the notion of black pride in me” (103).
34. “Now, as a grown man, I feel privileged to have come from two worlds” (103).
35. “I had pleased them, I saw the derision on their faces, the clever smiles, laughing at the
oddity of it, and I felt the same ache I felt when I gazed at the boy in the mirror. I
remembered him, and how free he was, and I hated him even more” (105).