The Candy House Quotes
"Nothing," he lied, because the trouble was too pervasive, too amorphous to explain.
"We’re both Black," Bix said with a grin, quoting the line he’d prepared in advance for a white questioner.
"You could say that," Miles said with deliberation. "I am not."
"I put up with negative attention in exchange for something else that matters more."
"That’s because I’m smiling, and he doesn’t smile."
"I’ve sacrificed everything for that. I think it’s worth it."
"How did I know? Because right before she married Drew, in 2008, she started returning things."
"But there’s this ring of dark trees around each lake. So even at night, you’re looking up from inside that darker ring at a lighter sky."
"I had the story soon enough in the form of scattered 'gray grabs' from the Collective Consciousness: people’s anonymous memories that included Damon."
"My ability to stay sober was more than explained by my ACE score, the metric for Adverse Childhood Experiences, which in my case was an almost unheard-of zero."
"I saw now that Sasha’s stealing was an addiction like my own. Yet she and Drew were still married, and their kids—even the boy, Lincoln, whom I remembered as being impossible—were reportedly fine."
"It might startle the average person to know how unremittingly these facts are still with me."
"I dream of Rob’s drowning, I weep over it, would do anything to be exorcised of it."
"But how can I erase awareness that has permeated every minute of my life since the event itself?"
"Rob’s folks passed away in the pandemic, just a few weeks apart."
"There’s usually a no-show or two," she says."
"Not long after Bix got back in touch, Sasha and I went to New York to visit him and Lizzie."
"I was clutching Sasha’s hand, and I felt her weeping."
"By the time we get back to the house, I’m having an uneasy feeling about Miles."
"At dinner he hangs back, watching the rest of us laugh around the firepit."
"The young people drift indoors, and the topic turns to a group of art collectors visiting tomorrow, from Virginia."
"They’ll want to do the predawn balloon launch, no question."
"But as I’m leaving the Clubhouse for my car, I consider what will happen if Miles doesn’t get a spot."
"The indifferent pilot brushes dust from his coat with a gloved hand. Neither gives a shit what I do; I’ve imagined that entire drama."
"M’s boyfriend, Marc, is a typical—a misleading term because, among counters, typicals are atypical and always a minority."
"Our father took us straight home after dinners at his house. We never stayed overnight."
"As high school approached, we overheard our father tell our mother that he wanted to send us to boarding school. To get them away from the madness."
"If you want them to have a grown-up father, then grow up."
"You’re strong girls, she told us on the phone in those first days. Stronger than you know. Be strong for each other, and for your father."
"The forest is like a sentient creature drawing breath around me."
"The moon’s brightness has a sound. It rings in the sky."
"There’s another way of seeing the world, like looking through the bottom of a glass."
"We had each other, and in each other we had our mother."
"My beautiful grown-up daughters, she said."
"Who has the energy to deal with a small sad woman at the bottom of a well?"
"It was deeper than love, it was need. All our lives, we had needed our mother; now our father needed us."
"But none of us had the slightest notion of what she’d done."
"Winning has its price, like everything else."
"I’ve wondered endlessly—obsessively—when and how Lana’s perspective began to diverge from mine after so much shared history."
"Life is good—it’s perfect, really—yet Lou is haunted by a sense of something just beyond it, something he is missing."
"We seized our father’s legs, and he put a hand on each of our heads, cupping Rolph’s and holding it against him."
"We are nothing like our mother, it turned out. We were our father’s creatures."
"The absurdity lay in the fact that he’d allowed himself to be dragooned here in the first place."
"But at last their motley caravan was moving."
"That’s the motor being taxed. It already needs an oil change, and I spent three hundred and twenty bucks last week on new shock absorbers."
"Chris had merely wanted to remind the driver that he was a, not i, and needed to shut up and do his job."
"He wasn’t the one with the problem, she was."
"The Mondrian hung, uninsured, in her living room; even alarmed, her house had been deemed too vulnerable by every actuary she consulted."
"Isn’t that what all Stanford grads do? Make apps?"
"You don’t need to scramble or fight to try to get someplace else because you are THERE."
"Molly, you should play D and D with us, my Uncle Jules is the GM, he’s awesome."
"It’s easier to believe in a foregone conclusion than to accept that our lives are governed by random chance."
"In the new heroism, the goal is to transcend individual life, with its petty pains and loves, in favor of the dazzling collective."
"You say that every single time, Dad. Word for word."
"Do I?" His father always seemed surprised.
"Arguably, you’ve never been on the rails," Dad says with a wink at me.
"You’ve lost your mind, Steph. Why do you cut her so much slack?"
The world is a lonely place," she says. "I’ve never tried to hide that from you.
Yes, you can, Bruce," Mom says. "You’re saying it too much right now.
"Your lack of espionage training is what makes your record clean and neutral."
"But when I was young and she was all I knew, I lived inside a force field that shielded me from every danger without concealing it. She made me strong."
"You have skills, a trade, a place in the world."
"You can’t just cut off a label with scissors because that leaves a prickly label stub that’s worse than the label itself."
"In the real world, there’s only one ending, and it isn’t happy," Mom has been telling us for as long as I can remember.
"How is our Athena?" Gregory projected, with effort, toward his open bedroom door. In the weeks since a mysterious fatigue had confined him to his bed, Gregory and Dennis had perfected the art of conversing between rooms.
"Unchanged," Dennis said. "Topical. Fearsome." He popped briefly into Gregory’s doorframe.
"The 'silos' and 'buckets' are empty," Dennis said.
What about 'empty'?" Gregory said. "Is 'empty' empty?
Empty is supposed to be empty," Dennis said. "Empty fails by being full.
"But does 'empty' convey enough emptiness?"
Find the eluder," she instructed her rapt graduate students, narrowing gold-flecked eyes at them across the seminar table. "I want words that are still alive, that have a pulse. Hot words, people! Give me the bullet, not the casing—fire it right in my chest. I’ll die gladly for some fresh language.
Finish your fucking book, Gregory," she said mildly. "It’s been bloody years.
"Are you trying to piss me off? Or is it happening by accident?"
"How are you, honey? You look a little tired. Is there anything I can do? How about a hug for your old mom?"
You’re forgetting yourselves, children," she said. "Your father was a private man. We’re not owed an explanation for anything he did.
"Finish your book!" Here was his father’s parting gift: a galaxy of human lives hurtling toward his curiosity.
"And so he returned to the Upstate New York town where he’d grown up."
"How could anyone live here but him? Ames decided, on the spot, to buy this memory palace."
"Knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information."
"Miles towels off Ames’s lime-smelling hair because Miles loves winning and a family is a team."
"Trophy recovered, they walk to their station wagon, the only car left in the lot, crossing asphalt that glitters like stars under the parking lights."
What now, slugger?" he asks. "Anything you want.