28 pages 56 minutes read

Quiara Alegría Hudes

Water By The Spoonful

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2012

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Important Quotes

Quotation Mark Icon

“This is a long time to have a phrase stuck in your head.” 


(Scene 1, Page 10)

Elliot has been back from Iraq for three years, with this phrase stuck in his mind. This line suggests that there are no time limits to trauma and pain. People have to face traumatic events in their past (near or distant) to experience healing in the present, and those traumatic events can return again, even after they seem to vanish. 

Quotation Mark Icon

“Rough translation, ‘Can I please have my passport back?’” 


(Scene 1, Page 11)

The phrase that Elliot wants translated seems innocuous enough, and the audience never learns what it really means to him. This represents an undercurrent of the play–a trauma from the past haunting a character in the present. 

Quotation Mark Icon

“Japan…Wow, that little white rock sure doesn’t discriminate.”


(Scene 2, Page 14)

Chutes&Ladders, an African-American male, is surprised to learn that Orangutan is Japanese. It’s a small moment, but it highlights that everyone is vulnerable to pain and addiction. It’s also one of the few, but key, references to race/ethnicity in the play. The Ortiz family is Puerto Rican, and each of the other characters is from a different cultural background. It’s not discussed explicitly in the play but is certainly a piece of the overall theme of different people coming together in harmony (the chat room) or in discord (Yaz’s divorce from a man with a different socio-cultural background).