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81 " I found it a comfort to be in the kitchen with her. The stove and the window and Sandy and the clock. "
― Ann Patchett , The Dutch House
82 " Maeve had a stack of Henry James novels on her bedside table. The Turn of the Screw? Was that what they wanted? "
83 " She was in her room, sitting on the window seat with her long legs straight out in front of her. She had a book in her lap but she wasn’t reading it, she was looking out at the garden. The room was angled to the west while not facing west directly, and the way the last bit of light fell over her, she looked like a painting. "
84 " expectation, "
85 " The children had been happy to see me when I first came through the door the day before but since had discovered that I was the same person they’d always known. "
86 " our stepmother, as close as a person on the other side of the street. "
87 " 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. "
88 " Every time I rolled the dice and moved the little iron forward, I thought how lucky I was: city, job, family, house. "
89 " Maybe it was possible, we thought, to rise above the pathetic holidays of our youth. "
90 " It must be a comfort, having them with you,” Andrea said to him, not of his children but of his paintings. "
91 " Things changed again after that, change being the one constant. "
92 " Celeste was plenty happy in those days, though in retrospect she was the ultimate victim of bad timing, thinking that because she was good in chemistry she should marry a doctor instead of becoming a doctor herself. Had she come along a few years later she might have missed that trap altogether. "
93 " All of this happened around the time I’d fallen in love with one of the VanHoebeek daughters, or rather with her portrait, which I called Julia. Julia had narrow shoulders and yellow hair held back by a green ribbon. Her portrait hung in a bedroom on the third floor of the Dutch House above a bed no one ever slept in. With the exception of Sandy, who ran the vacuum and wiped things down with a dust rag on Thursdays, no one but me set foot up there. I believed that Julia and I were true lovers thwarted by the misalignment of our births. I worked myself into such a state over the injustice of it all that I once made the error of calling my sister at Barnard to ask if she had ever wondered about the girl whose painting hung in the third-floor bedroom, the girl with the gray-green eyes who was one of the VanHoebeek daughters "
94 " The biggest lie in business is that it takes money to make money. Remember that. You’ve got to be smart, have a plan, pay attention to what’s going on around you. None of that costs a dime.” My "
95 " staying in New York for all of Friday and most of Saturday, and if Maeve ever called the house to "
96 " New York represented her shame about things that were in no way her fault, or at least that’s what I was thinking. "
97 " His grief was a river as deep and as wide as my own. I knew that I should have gone to him later, I should have tried to comfort him, but there was no comfort in me. "
98 " when you think about saints, I don’t imagine any of them made their families happy. "
99 " said, “and not as much work.” Jocelyn had found a family to cook for "
100 " The only way to really understand what money means is to have been poor, "