Housekeeping Quotes
"It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows."
"The wind is watery, and all the pumps and creeks and ditches smell of water unalloyed by any other element."
"Her love for them was utter and equal, her government of them generous and absolute."
"If every house in Fingerbone were to fall before our eyes, snuffing every light, the event would touch our senses as softly as a shifting among embers, and then the bitter darkness would step nearer."
"Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time."
"The time of the flood was the almost flawless mirror of a cloudless sky, fat with brimming and very calm."
"Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce."
"My grandmother loved to talk about these things. When she did, her eyes would roam over the goods she had accumulated unthinkingly and maintained out of habit as eagerly as if she had come to reclaim them."
"Every pantry in town had in it a box of thick candles, the color of homemade soap, for use at such times."
"The wanting never subsided until something—a quarrel, a visit—took her attention away."
"By the light of the candle on the vanity, Sylvie flipped and sorted through her deck of cards, plainly unaware that the black shape of judicial attention stood over us all, as enormous as our shadows."
"It occurred to me that most people in bus stations would be conspicuous if it were not for the numbers of others there who would otherwise be conspicuous in the same way."
"Sylvie lifted her shoulders. 'It just wasn’t in the cards,' she said."
"I imagined myself feigning sleep while Sylvie brushed my short brown hair into long golden ringlets, dropping each one carefully on the pillow."
"Deprived of all perspective and horizon, I found myself reduced to an intuition, and my sister and my aunt to something less than that."
"The restoration of the town was an exemplary community effort in which we had no part."
"Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy."
"If one should be shown odd fragments arranged on a silver tray and be told, 'That is a splinter from the True Cross, and that is a nail paring dropped by Barabbas, and that is a bit of lint from under the bed where Pilate’s wife dreamed her dream,' the very ordinariness of the things would recommend them."
"But then suddenly the lake and the river broke open and the water slid away from the land, and Fingerbone was left stripped and blackened and warped and awash in mud."
"We felt small in the landscape, and out of place."
"Every morning in August Lucille in her nightgown touched her toes by our open window, because she had read somewhere that good health is a form of beauty."
"But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home."
"The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted."
"Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it."
"For families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs out of all these sorrows and sit in the porches and sing them on mild evenings."
"Families should stay together. Otherwise things get out of control."
"Families are a sorrow, and that's the truth."
"It is a terrible thing to break up a family."
"For she could regard me without strong emotion—a familiar shape, a familiar face, a familiar silence."
"Perhaps memory is the seat not only of prophecy but of miracle as well."
"In the way people are strange, they grow stranger."
"Sometimes I think sorrow is a predatory thing because birds scream at dawn with a marvelous terror."
"It had never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged, though when I thought about it, it seemed obvious."
"Nothing would be more familiar to us than her silence, and her sad, abstracted calm."
"We burned papers and magazines until well after dark. We forgot supper."
"I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort."
"I believe it was the crossing of the bridge that changed me finally."
"Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation."
"Once you have set your foot in that path it is hard to imagine another one."
"We are drifters. And once you have set your foot in that path it is hard to imagine another one."
"No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass... could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence."