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The High House QUOTES

The High House QUOTES

1 " Somehow, while we had all been busy, while we had been doing those small things that added up to living, the future had slipped into the present - and despite the fact that we had known that it would come, the overwhelming feeling, now that it was here, was of surprise, like waking up one morning to find that you had been young, and now all at once you weren't. "

― Jessie Greengrass , The High House

2 " ... I heard her say,
- They think this baby is an admission of defeat,
and then,
- They think it means that I no longer care. Or that I don't believe in what I say -
but watching her I thought that it was not defeat at all. Rather, it was a kind of furious defiance that had let her to have a child, despite all she believed about the future - a kind of pact with the world that, having increased her stake in it, she should try to protect what she had found to love. "

― Jessie Greengrass , The High House

3 " There is a kind of organic mercy, grown deep inside us, which makes it so much easier to care about small, close things, else how could we live? As I grew up, crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability and we tuned it out like static, we adjusted to each emergent normality and we did what we had always done - the commutes and holidays, the Friday big shops, day trips to the countryside, afternoons in the park. "

― Jessie Greengrass , The High House

4 " ...to be needed is to be held in place. "

― Jessie Greengrass , The High House

5 " Precarity and continuity... We all end up dead, but the land we leave goes on, we hope. "

― Jessie Greengrass , The High House