Snow Falling on Cedars Death Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #7

Ishmael saw Eric Bledsoe bleed to death. Fifty yards away he lay in the surf pleading in a soft voice for help. (16.35)

Although Ishmael and some other soldiers were close enough to go get Bledsoe, they were forbidden from doing so, since they would likely get shot. So, they had to sit there under cover, watching him bleed out—brutal stuff.

Quote #8

He did not want to explain to her his coldness or reveal himself. He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband's death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence—something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it borrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it. (24.42)

Ishmael is contrasting his mother's experience of death and grief (as she experienced it with her husband's passing) with his own feelings of grief, which are likely (in large part, if not entirely) related to losing Hatsue, as opposed to his brushes with death in the war.

Quote #9

"I'm dead in the water." (27.46)

Carl says this when Kabuo finds him floating out in the fog with a dead battery. Obviously, it's a sad bit of foreshadowing, since Carl himself is dead in the water not long after this point.