In The Dream House Quotes
"The Dream House is real. It is as real as the book you are holding in your hands, though significantly less terrifying."
"Your actions are mightier than any architect’s intentions."
"The trick, or maybe it’s the punch line, is that the yellow always comes off on your skin. The dandelion yields every time."
"Our bodies and minds will always crave something, even if we don’t recognize it."
"Every room can be a bedroom: you only need a bed, or not even that. You only need to sleep there."
"We can’t stop living. Which means we have to live, which means we are alive."
"I thought you died, but writing this, I’m not sure you did."
"Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed."
"They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough."
"You are lucky to have met her. You are not some weird, desperate mess. You are wanted."
"The Dream House is as much a character in this story as any person."
"We will always be hungry, will always want."
"Sometimes your tongue is removed, sometimes you still it of your own accord."
"A house is never apolitical. It is conceived, constructed, occupied, and policed by people with power, needs, and fears."
"Nothing acted on, just that you find many people attractive and do your best to surround yourself with smart, funny minds, and the result is a gooey, lovely space somewhere between philia and eros."
"The problem is that denial sounds like confession to her, so the burden of proof is forced upon you."
"That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine."
"When she gets close to you, reaches toward you, you realize she is naked. 'Why are you crying?' she asks in a voice so sweet your heart splits open like a peach."
"I was so afraid and cowering, and she was screaming, and I was hiding from her, hiding from the woman who once told me she loved me."
"You are two things, maybe even more; and you are neither."
"It’s hard, saying a story without a critical part."
"But isn’t the best part of a possession story that the inflicted can do and say horrific things for which they’ll receive carte blanche forgiveness the next day?"
"You can wound air as cleanly as you can wound flesh."
"You feel things deeply, and often the profound unfairness of the world triggered a furious, poetic response from me."
"You are a modern woman and you don’t believe in God or any accompanying mythologies."
"She never says exactly that, of course; she just wants to know who you’re talking to, who she should be avoiding, who she shouldn’t bother to try to charm."
"You are still cooking when people arrive, still cooking as people are laughing and eating off paper plates standing up and not quite looking at you."
"In an essay in Naming the Violence—the first anthology of writing by queer women addressing domestic abuse in their community—activist Linda Geraci recalls a fellow lesbian’s paraphrasing Pat Parker to her straight acquaintance."
"In spite of all you have done to me, I find you a pitiable man."
"Enjoy your good feelings while you can. There may not be many more of them."
"Evil is a powerful word. You use it once, and it tastes bad: metallic, false."
"Everyone’s heart does not break in the same way, but you know what he means."
"I am filled with grief and sorrow that you do not believe in amicable partings."
"I think a lot about what evidence, had it been measured or recorded or kept, would help make my case."
"What we have will transcend this messy business, and we will be in each other’s lives forever."
"The raccoon is a trickster; everyone knows that."
"I know it sounds incredible. The image is cartoonish."