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1 " There are years that ask questions and years that answer. "
― , The Yellow House
2 " The house's disappearance from the landscape was not different from my father's absence. His was a sudden erasure for my mother and siblings, a prolonged and present absence for me, an intriguing story with an ever-expanding middle that never drew to a close. The house held my father inside of it, preserved; it bore his traces. As long as the house stood, containing these remnants, my father was not yet gone. And then suddenly, he was. "
3 " Distance lends perspective, but it can also shade, misinterpret. "
4 " when a person dies in a place they become the place and nothing is ever the same again. "
5 " Remembering is a chair that it is hard to sit still in. "
6 " Who has the rights to the story of a place? Are these rights earned, bought, fought and died for? Or are they given? Are they automatic, like an assumption? Self-renewing? Are these rights a token of citizenship belonging to those who stay in the place or to those who leave and come back to it? Does the act of leaving relinquish one’s rights to the story of a place? Who stays gone? Who can afford to return? "
7 " And she knew, above all, how to work, which is always the beginning of fashioning a self. "
8 " Don’t tell stories” when she means don’t tell lies. I keep trying to know the difference. "
9 " The mythology of New Orleans—that it is always the place for a good time; that its citizens are the happiest people alive, willing to smile, dance, cook, and entertain for you; that it is a progressive city open to whimsy and change—can sometimes suffocate the people who live and suffer under the place’s burden, burying them within layers and layers of signifiers, making it impossible to truly get at what is dysfunctional about the city. "
10 " When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house. "
11 " Water has a perfect memory,” Toni Morrison has said, “and is forever trying to get back to where it was. "
12 " We own what belongs to us whether we claim it or not. "
13 " The things we have forgotten are housed. Our soul is an abode and by remembering houses and rooms, we learn to abide within ourselves. Gaston Bachelard "
14 " we are beating you because you did a wrong thing as a grown man, because you hurt our mother who we love more than anything, because we can beat sense into you and addiction out of you even though of course we cannot, because if we do not beat you someone else will beat you to death and this will destroy us, too. "
15 " Dresses you might wear for special occasions she wore every day. In this way she and Joseph were alike. They dressed to be seen, which is how it came to be that they built up a reputation for floor showing, as Uncle Joe calls it. “Yeah, we knew we looked good.” They danced wherever there was a floor—a bar or a ball. The sidewalk, sometimes. “We used to go in clubs and start dancing from the door. For a poor man I used to dress my can off,” he says. “That’s what used to get me in so much trouble and thing with the ladies.” He and his baby sister, Ivory, would swing it out, jitterbugging and carrying on. Ivory was always fun and always light on her feet. She was especially gifted at being led and men generally loved this quality in her. "
16 " Zora Neale Hurston said, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer. "
17 " She was contained but occasionally mercurial. She could go off on you in a split second. When the presentation of the body stands in for all the qualities the world claims you cannot possess, some people call you elegant. Grandmother was that, yes, but sometimes elegance is just willpower and grace, a way to keep the flailing parts of the self together. "
18 " Shame is a slow creeping. The most powerful things are quietest, if you think about it. Like water. "
19 " Remembering hurts, but forgetting is Herculean. "
20 " When you are babiest in a family with eleven older points of view, eleven disparate rallying cries, eleven demanding and pay-attention-to-me voices—all variations of the communal story—developing your own becomes a matter of survival. There can be, in this scenario, no neutral ground. "