Quotes from book

Housekeeping

“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 of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.”

“It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.”

“When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.”

“You never know when you might be seeing someone for the last time.”

“Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.”

“Of my conception I know only what you know of yours. It occurred in darkness and I was unconsenting… By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it.”