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61 " The kitchen was at the back of the house and there was a window over the sink. Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink. “My "
― Ann Patchett , The Dutch House
62 " Though I had been a doctor for only a short time, I knew the havoc the well could unleash upon the sick. "
63 " She shrugged. “I gave up caring where I lived a long time ago, and anyway, I think it’s good for me. It teaches me humility. She teaches me humility.” She tipped her head backwards the way Maeve would do. “You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself. Andrea’s my penance for all the mistakes. "
64 " At the time I didn’t hate her, so why do I scrub out every memory of kindness, or even civility, in favor of the memories of someone being awful? "
65 " (The dining room ceiling was painted a shade of blue both deep and intense, and was covered in intricate configurations of carved leaves that had been painted gold, or, more accurately, the leaves had been gilded. The gilt leaves were arranged in flourishes which were surrounded by circles of gilt leaves within squares of gilt leaves. The ceiling was more in keeping with Versailles than Eastern Pennsylvania, and when I was a child I found it mortifying. Maeve and my father and I made a point of keeping our eyes on our plates during dinner.) "
66 " There are a few times in life, when you leap up, and the past that you've been standing on falls away behind you. And the future you mean to land on is not yet in place. And for a moment you're suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself. "
67 " I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes. "
68 " up in a different car. Or I could have been in the right car but picked another seat. We could have missed each other.” “Maybe on that day,” I would say, running the tips of my fingers along her fascinating curls. “But I would have found you eventually.” I said this because I knew it was what Celeste wanted to hear, this warm girl in my arms who smelled like Ivory soap, but I believed it too, if not romantically then at least statistically: two kids from Jenkintown and Rydal going to college in New York City were likely to bump into one another somewhere along the way. “The only reason I picked that seat was because I saw the chemistry book. You weren’t even sitting there.” “That’s right,” I said. Celeste smiled. "
69 " So you’ll get a job, right? That’s what people do after college.” But as soon as I said it I understood that I was supposed to be Celeste’s job. The poetry courses and the senior thesis on Trollope were all well and good but I was what she’d been studying. She meant to keep the tiny apartment clean and make dinner and eventually have a baby. Women had read about their liberation in books but not many of them had seen what it looked like in action. Celeste had no idea what she was supposed to do with a life that was entirely her own. "
70 " We could sit here all night talking about cancer. I'm just telling you it's unsettling. There are thousands of ways your body can go off the rails for no reason whatsoever and chances are you won't know about any of it until it's too late. "
71 " had been different in 1959 when Maeve went to Barnard. Girls and their dates still got dressed up to go to the Apollo for amateur night, but by 1968 pretty much every representation of hope in the country had been put up against a wall and shot. Boys at Columbia went to class and boys in Harlem went to war, a reality not suspended for a friendly Saturday pick-up game. "
72 " There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself. "
73 " never saw my father scold the tenants or make any threats. He only listened, and then he told them to try their best. But after three months of conversation, there would be a different family living in the apartment the next time we came back. I never knew what happened to the people with hard luck, but it happened on some day other than the first Saturday of the month. "
74 " The heat in the hallways either ran to tropical or didn’t run at all. It made me think what a luxury it was to rattle on about a faucet in need of a washer, while failing to remind me that this too was a building my father owned, and that it was well within his power to open the trunk of his car and make things better for the people who lived there. One by one, he knocked on the doors and the doors opened and we listened to whatever the people inside had to say: husbands out of work, husbands gone, wives gone, children sick. "
75 " I almost never got to an answer before Maeve did but in this case it was perfectly obvious. “Because the mother wasn’t there.” If there had been a woman in the apartment he never would have put himself in the middle of things. Mothers were the measure of safety, which meant that I was safer than Maeve. "
76 " room telling "
77 " * * * There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself. It "
78 " but New York City was a wild card. Every hour was made up of a series of chances, and choosing to walk down one street instead of another had the potential to change everything: whom you met, what you saw or were spared from seeing. "
79 " There were no leaves on the linden trees, "
80 " Then I remembered what my father had told me, that the things we could do nothing about were best put out of our minds. "