"Housekeeping" Quotes
"Housekeeping" follows two sisters growing up in a small Idaho town as they navigate loss, transience, and the meaning of family under the care of their eccentric aunt.
fiction | 219 pages | Published in 2005
Quotes
The soundlessness of her youth lay over them as they might have been sleeping at the bottom of the cold lake, beneath a scum of lily pads, forever peaceful, forever vaguely distressed.
Memory is the knapsack of the traveler.
To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.
Home-made bread and butter, the parcels and clothes that remember us and that we in our turn remember, childhood itself—all these things are powers, not things we have created.
How far the eying of a thing is from the touch!
She seemed golden, solitary, and unaware of the world.
For the first time in my life, I thought—not of myself, of my imaginings and daydreams—but of her, of the person I was with, of the first person singular. She embodied it, like an outside and bearable freedom.
Alphabetically arranged, as such, bears no thread of narrative. Begins and ends in the middle of things, lacking all but the illusion of order.
What they foresaw was always grander than what we find.
There are bumps on the road to knowledge. We call them writers.
