Homecoming Quotes
"Nonsense," she’d said, "I’m just unusually perceptive."
"Thomas would get that faraway glint in his eye when he expounded on the subject, the romantic sentimentalist’s fascination with the folklore of his country."
"A sage friend once told her that people didn’t change as they aged, they merely became older and sadder."
"The blue gums stood silent, streaky skins glinting metallic. They were old and had seen it all before."
"Black Sunday," the papers had taken to calling it. The worst fires seen since the colony had been formed.
"Some of his best memories were of sitting around the campfire telling stories and making each other laugh, counting the stars in the night sky, and teaching them real skills, like how to find fresh water and catch their own food."
"The angelic face belied a tough-as-nails survivor’s spirit."
"Whenever Jess felt angry or sad or even just inexplicably unsettled, she paid a visit to the Charles Dickens Museum on Doughty Street."
"This marvelous fact had got Jess thinking about all of the other houses she walked past each day."
"Someone I used to know a long time ago told me once that fear is the doorway to opportunity."
"And I can assure you, my love, that every good thing that’s happened to me since has come through acting despite my fears."
"Nora had lived in Darling House all her life and was as much a part of the building as the pair of lions guarding its entrance gate and the brick chimneys punctuating the sparkling blue sky."
"The language of houses is my mother tongue. This house taught it to me when I was a very small child."
"We can’t allow ourselves to be the victims of our childhoods."
"One can’t blame one’s parents—or indeed one’s children—for everything. Most people do the best they can and sometimes, sadly, it’s not enough."
"Life doesn’t always work out the way we plan, but it does work out in the end."
"I’d lost so much by then. My whole family was gone, and I was all alone. But there was no way I was going to let the bank take my home. I’d made myself a new family—tiny though it was—and I decided then and there that I would do whatever it took to keep my daughter safe and to secure her future."
"What I can never forgive, and will always fail utterly to comprehend, is how a person could ever bring herself to harm her own children."
"Darling House seemed to know itself unoccupied. It was the opposite of a haunted house; without Nora it was a house without a spirit."
"Parenthood is more than the supply of a bit of DNA."
"If a woman doesn’t take herself seriously, she’ll have a difficult time convincing anyone else to bother."
"Nora was full of life: when she entered a room, people turned to see what had just happened."
"I cannot tell you the satisfaction one gets from having planted and loved a garden."
"Words, Jess had observed, could be as tricky as people: seeming to say one thing, when all the while another, secret meaning lay beneath the surface."
"The fertile smell of rain and earth mingled with other rich, secretive bushland scents."
"He suffered the dreamer’s curse: the moment one grand plan came close to fruition, another bright light started flickering on the horizon."
"It was sobering to witness this family in a shared, happy moment, each member unaware of what the future had in store."
"That the past was not something to be escaped from, but a fundamental part of who one was."
"Sometimes coming home isn’t as simple as you think."
"The period typesetting, the formality of the style and the voices of the people quoted caused time to collapse in upon itself so that Jess could see and feel and smell the scenes described."
"It is of no concern to me. I know as well as any that change, like solution, often comes suddenly."
"Sometimes when a person says there’s fog down in the valley, they just mean there’s fog down in the valley."
"In Australia, the strangeness came from the land itself. Its mystery and meaning existed outside language—or outside her own language, at any rate."
"This continent was one where beauty and terror were inextricably linked."
"It had occurred to Isabel Turner, at certain times over the course of her marriage, that antipodeans were more concerned with tradition and its observation than any of the so-called aristocrats she’d known in England."
"A name is just a name, wishing does not make it so."
"Fourteen years later, in the aftermath of 'that Christmas Eve,' the evergreen idea that the fates of the two women were entwined was to gain new currency."
"Blood spilled, old curses. Things from the past."
"Mrs. Turner had little time for superstition."
"Her mother’s maiden name, Mlle Amélie F. Pinot, was stenciled in faded gold ink along one side of the tan leather lid."
"To walk was to think, to think was to breathe, to breathe was to stay alive."
"That foggy night in '44, he had been too stunned by her beauty in the filtered moonlight."
"The Turners were not self-centered people, but as a family they were so complete, their loyalties and grievances so tightly interwoven, that they did not easily admit outsiders."
"She had big dreams for the future. She planned to travel, to live in New York City, to play jazz in nightclubs with their names spelled out in neon lights."
"My dear wife was the one broken thing I had not been able to fix."
"Of big stone houses and paddocks of pale grass and gum trees with tall silver trunks."
"It seemed to Jess that there’d been several contenders: the mushroom (for presumably that’s what it was?) that Evie sourced for Matilda; the rat poison John and Matthew discovered in the pantry."
"He called it a 'nonfiction novel.' He believed that the tools used by novelists should be available to journalists, too."
"Life was sacred. 'We can do this. Together, we can do it. We’ll get married.'"
"What I am going to tell you is a shameful family secret."
"The story was impossible to comprehend."
"You’ll think everything’s fine, and then one day you’ll have a baby—trust me, having a baby changes things—and he’ll look at you and it will be there in his eyes."
"He hadn’t sensationalized events; his affection for his characters had been evident as he sought to show the ways in which a shocking event leaves its mark on everyone, individually and as a community."
"To possess an estate of unequaled civilization and comfort but know that it stood on the precipice of danger: therein lay the charge."
"This Nora was at least a decade younger than Jess was now, and Miller’s notes showed a side of her that Jess had never known: vulnerable, less certain of herself, grief-stricken, but also a new mother, passionately in love with the baby who’d arrived in the midst of a family tragedy."
"What made Halcyon intoxicating, she knew, at least as far as Thomas was concerned, lay beyond the plush cushions and curtains of the grand house, the stone and marble and shiny brass fittings, the green lawn and the irrigated garden; it was the situation of the property, set as it was in the middle of the stark southern landscape."
"The cold fingers, decidedly lifeless. The ribbon of memories of other versions of the same hand, warm."
"Polly did not make such jokes, as a rule, but the only other possibility was that her mother was speaking in earnest, and that was impossible to accept."
"We will learn what happened to the Turner family. No matter what it takes, we'll learn the truth."
"He smiled cheerfully when he saw her—courtesy, no more—and, for want of a better introduction, she blurted out, 'I think you’re my father.'"
"She had struggled to find the right word to describe the emotion she was feeling, before realizing it was grief."
"What was a person to do when she was stuck in a place she didn’t recognize, with no signposts, and no idea where to put the next step?"
"Just when she’d started to get the hang of having a baby, had gained some release from the constant fear that she was going to damage this perfect child they’d sent home with her from the hospital."
"The one time that Nora had relied on Jess to advocate for her, she had failed."
"But what if one didn’t know where 'there' was?"
"A mother is only ever as happy as her unhappiest child."
"Being a mother doesn’t always come naturally. It’s like anything—one must learn the ropes."
"You abandoned both of us a long time ago."
"This, then, was the final chapter that Nancy Davis had mentioned."
"Morality is a funny thing. It often has little to do with lawfulness."
"From the dark wet street, the house looked warm and welcoming, a beacon of tranquility in a sea of trouble."
"It could do that to you, this country. The sounds, the colors, the stories of make and break—there was something brutally stark about it all."
"Events of the day, but even more than that, at an elemental level."
"She was remarkable. She was mine. She was everything I’d ever wanted and dreamed of."
"I held her to me as if maybe, just maybe, I might that way give life back to her."
"The contents of the tape had explained certain things."
"The healing properties of shout-singing 'Like a Prayer' as one drove through ever-changing countryside."
"I’d give anything to go back in time and do it all differently."
"Struggling to process what her grandmother had done, the secret she’d kept."
"Time had faded the ink on the journal’s pages, and Jess had to move to stand beneath the window to make out what was written."
"Here, finally, was Isabel Turner’s journal from 1959, its lined paper covered with beautiful handwriting."
"These keepsakes were important. Polly, especially, had a right to see them."
"Likely, Leo Friedman had never had a meeting end so abruptly as the gathering that day at Darling House."
"I always liked him in the book. He seemed to be a kind man. The way he cared for his wife."
"Actually, the owner was my uncle. His name was Thomas Turner. Maybe you knew him? I’ve never met him. He died last year."
"It’s a beautiful house, a bit neglected now, but still impressive."
"It was just lying there, as if it had been waiting for me to find it."
"The sea was calm tonight: tide rolling in and then pulling away again. It was his favorite sound."
"Strange the way life went. It really did happen while you were busy looking the other way."
"Time had a way of fading emotion out of memories, but Percy could still touch the terror and confusion of those days after he left the baby in the rose..."
"But his thinking had been simplistic. All events, like all objects, cast a shadow; there was no way to escape it."
"To feel known was a revelation. To have to give it up was like being expelled from home."
"A determination had gripped him after the Turner deaths, and he’d dedicated himself to a pursuit of the law."
"By keeping my own secrets, I did the same thing to you that Nora did to me—withheld important parts of your identity."
"It never failed to amaze Jess, the power of the written word to impart not only knowledge, but experience."