5 Quotes from Where The Crawdads Sing that Push Us to Reflect On The Power of Words and Emotions

A book that broke my heart and then mended it, repeatedly

Book Title: Where the Crawdads Sing Author: Delia Owens

Unlike many writers and poets, I am not a Nature kind of person. If anything, I was born into the Forest of Cement (Hong Kong) and then subsequently moved into a suburban neighbourhood where the only nature involves visiting hares and the grass on our lawn.

At best, given all the discomfort “the outside” gives me, our relationship is strictly professional. I only stray out there for professional needs; I spend no time dilly-dallying for fun in the outdoors.

The protagonist of this book, Kya Clark, is so different from anyone I have ever known in real life. For a good few chapters, my thoughts cycled between “why was there no grown-up around to protect this child” and “damn, I cannot relate to this child’s love for nature the slightest bit.”

But chapter by chapter, as good writing does, I grew to know her and to love her and learn more about the things she truly loves. She plays, lives, breathes in the marshes. I too, as the story unfolds, came to love the descriptions, curious about how my body might react if I placed myself in this character’s shoes.

It’s likely that I’m still deeply allergic to a lot of the marsh lands, as I am with many pieces of nature locally. But instead of having a default “no thank you” to travelling to these places, my curiosity was piqued. I would at least want to know and explore the beauty of the land even if it cost me the rest of the day in sniffles and possible hives.

That is the power of a well-written book.

I wasn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.

For bookworms and writers alike, this will probably be the quote that resonates with them the most. This quote left a pleasant flavour in my mouth. My brain returned often during idle moments to these words.

How self-fulfilling it is for a quote to both say but also demonstrate the power of how words could convey something so much. How powerful it is that this very quote also resonates so deeply with us.

As someone who writes a lot and thinks a lot, I know for a fact that not all my pieces are top quality. It’s not that I intentionally create bad pieces. It’s that often when we have thoughts that we try to convey to an audience, the writing experience is more of an experimentation process.

We learn from trial and error on what we think could be best digested by an audience.

Sometimes, those words are emptier and resonate less than you thought. Sometimes they resonate instantly and you get an outpour of support. But those aren’t the only extremes.

Sometimes, you write something that’s an instant hit, but they fade away across eternity, losing weight by the moment. Sometimes, your writing simply hasn’t found the right audience and when it does, the stories and words hold meaning left to be unlocked.

This is what happened when I wrote the piece: Escape.

It’s a poem about my experience growing up with an abusive mother. Often, people don’t want to hear about stories of abuse. They want happiness, positive.

Because most people — even at their most complicated teen phase — have eventually positive interactions and personal connections with their own mother, most people do not ever want to hear about abusive mothers. It often shatters this “mothers have a kind, loving mothering instinct” belief that is so strong that when challenged by examples, people throw additional hate to victims of abuse, blaming them for these experiences.

This poem falls into that last category. Words that I thought held no meaning other than for me because I thought these were unique experiences that never happened to anyone else. It wasn’t until I shared quotes of this piece on another platform where it was picked up by others who had been through the same situation that I realized how much the sentences held.

We live in a world that puts implicit blame on victims and absolves abusive mothers, trying to soften violence that a woman could “truly” perpetuate on her own children against an assumed mothering instinct. My poem held value, empowerment and validation for those who ended up silencing themselves, sharing a story of hope catered to them that most other readers would not value.

That is the power of writing, and I loved how this theme permeated through the entire book.

Questions: What is the short-term and long-term value of your writing? What balance do you strike in writing for yourself vs. writing for others? What sentences, quotes, even words, hold the most meaning to you?

His dad had told him many times that the definition of a real man is one who cries without shame, reads poetry with his heart, feels opera in his soul, and does what’s necessary to defend a woman.

I found both meaning and criticism in this quote.

The meaning comes from the characterization of male-identifying characters who are in tune with their emotions, and express them (here, specifically, with poetry). This is something I’d like to see more often.

Toxic masculinity often pressed down on whether men feel comfortable in sharing their experiences and emotions with others. Often, just saying that we should encourage men to stray out of their shells and be more comfortable without accompanying social change to support this move is an empty suggestion.

In seeing more characters that both share this view and model it throughout, we see this change in action rather than in empty words.

The criticism is obvious: I shuddered at the heteronormativity of statements like “what’s necessary to defend a woman”, but I withheld this judgment and challenged myself to focus on the bits of change instead of the bits of “unchange”.

Questions: In what way(s) do you express emotion? How much of how you express emotions are limited or expanded by society’s expectation for whether you “should” express emotion? How might you encourage others to manage, feel and express their own emotions against previous/ old traditions?

Why should the injured, the still bleeding, bear the onus of forgiveness?

This quote is also one of those short quotes that embody the theme from the first — that one sentence could hold so much.

We often sweep people into forgiveness because forgiveness, in theory, is a virtue. It’s something that acts as glue so that wounds in the past can scar over, strengthening connections as we move forward. That is if the wound heals in due time, and there have been changes in behaviour made.

Too often, in hopes of achieving the above state as soon as possible, we sweep still-bleeding victims into forgiveness as fast as possible. There’s this hope that by doing so, we’re “solving” the problem efficiently.

It’s not true. Forcing someone into forgiveness while they’re still bleeding, or while the instigator is still perpetuating harm, doesn’t achieve the goals and benefits of forgiveness. In fact, it achieves the complete opposite, leaving deeper wounds and letting the perpretrator keep their power in doing so.

This is a quote that viscerally illustrated this concept that I think a lot of people miss or have yet to learn.

Questions: When something happens to you, do you feel pressured to forgive? What is your usual process of forgiveness? Do you feel like it works effectively to help support you in managing and processing your emotions? In what ways have you pushed someone else into forgiveness by default?

In what ways would you change past default behaviours in terms of pushing someone towards forgiveness? How might you first engage in empathy instead? What signs might you look out for to figure out whether you were prematurely imposing forgiveness as an expectation on someone else that needs to be supported in a different way?

Female fireflies draw in strange males with dishonest signals and eat them; mantis females devour their own mates. Female insects, Kya thought, know how to deal with their lovers.

The parallel between animal behaviour and Kya learning how to manage herself alone and without guidance was powerful. For someone who grew up entirely alone, she learned her lessons through nature.

I think that was powerful. In a way, her life lacked connections because of the adults who failed to protect her as a child. She also lacked connection because instead of providing support to her when she was a child without appropriate parental/ guardian support, society shunned her and labelled her as “weird”.

As I read the book, I reflected on just how many lessons I learned from interacting with others, failing and learning and improving with practice. She (and it breaks my heart to say this) never got this chance, save for a few horny boys who initially came her way literally to goad her into their sexual fantasies.

Yet, the resilience (and once again, it should not have been left to her resilience) in her drawing connections with what she learned in books and observed out in the nature of the Marsh, was remarkable.

It made me question what kinds of assumptions I had about the world based on how and where I derived this information. It made me reflect on what kinds of biases and pieces of information I’m missing because I default to getting information that way.

It made me wonder whether, if sitting in front of the marsh, or any piece of nature, I would simply be bored and/or scared of nature, rather than tuning into the beauty that Kya saw in how the marsh creatures thrived.

Questions: What lessons have you learned from nature? In what ways do you derive your knowledge most commonly (e.g., books, people, observation, etc.)? Of these ways of knowing, what are the advantages and the drawbacks? What other ways do you want to explore in terms of gaining knowledge that you haven’t quite tried before?

She could read anything now, he said, and once you can read anything you can learn everything. It was up to her. “Nobody’s come close to filling their brains,” he said. “We’re all like giraffes not using their necks to reach the higher leaves.

This quote points out that we have access to all the knowledge under the stars, yet a lot of us don’t ever reach the full capacity.

Part of this can be interpreted in this undertone that laments that most people don’t ever reach their full potential by not choosing to pick up knowledge via books. I understand this point of view, but I also see that there are points in our lives where we just don’t have the time because we’re focused on surviving.

This really connected to an earlier revelation I had while reading Michelle Obama’s book “Becoming”:

Michelle’s story validated my experiences. She read when she was intrigued and interested. When met with the overwhelming stress of her FLOTUS duties, she relaxed with home renovation shows. Her sharing of this story helped me reflect on my debunked yet lingering rigid notion that “you must be an avid bookworm, 24/7/365” to be someone of importance, someone who contributes positively to her community, to be smart and productive.

On the other hand, I see that this quote also links with this previous lesson in that it’s a hidden dare to continue growing, consuming things that you’re curious about. The keywords: curious/intrigued.

When the time is right, and when there is space to, I feel challenged to reach out and challenge myself with learning things that I really haven’t before and to try stepping out of my comfort zone.

This quote makes me reflect on the “no one is filling their brains”, making me wonder how I’m determining what goes into my brain each day. Currently, as I’m wrapping up my final Ph.D. semester with courses, I’m relying on audiobooks for leisure because my eyes are just too tired to read anything else beyond my required readings. There is a right place and time for everything.

Questions: What kinds of books are you reading? Other than books, what do you read to fill your brain? What are your selection criteria for reading these pieces? Do you wish to improve these selection criteria in any way?

Summary

• The beauty of words and writing comes from the power to say so much with so few words.
• There is power in expressing emotion, and we should continue to empower everyone, regardless of social location factors, to continue honing this skill.
• Forgiveness is an important virtue, but often we sweep those who are injured into this before they have healed. As a community, we need to reflect on how to best support those in need without imposing our expectations of forgiveness on others.
• We all have tendencies in where we source our information. I’m reflecting on how painfully little I rely on observing nature to gain insight; for you, it might be the opposite. In thinking about this, perhaps we can come to a consensus of exactly why we might all hold such different beliefs.
• There are so many books out there that it’s impossible to cram it all into our heads at the same time. Reflecting on the selection criteria we have for reading books (and whether it still fits our values) and how we might consume this information might help us more intentionally read the content that we truly want to be consuming.

Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) continues to “read” audiobooks borrowed from her local library and can’t wait to milk the last of this resource by reading all the books under the stars! Please let me know (comment, tweet, bat signal) if you have any good book suggestions!