“The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.”

“What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.”

“She slowly became convinced…that at the center of the universe not God but a tremendous deadness reigned. The stillness of a drunk God, passed out cold…She had learned of it in that house…where the drunks crashed…Things had happened to her there. She was neither raped nor robbed, nor did she experience God’s absence to any greater degree than other people did. She wasn’t threatened or made to harm anyone against her will. She wasn’t beaten, either, or deprived of speech or voice. It was, rather, the sad blubbering stories she heard in the house. Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life – disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not touching her.”

“We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif-books in piles and on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are books waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books...They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables...I can't imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is.”

“The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.”

“Leave the dishes.Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigeratorand an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.Don't even sew on a button.Let the wind have its way, then the earththat invades as dust and then the deadfoaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzlesor the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worrywho uses whose toothbrush or if anythingmatches, at all.Except one word to another. Or a thought.Pursue the authentic-decide firstwhat is authentic,then go after it with all your heart.Your heart, that placeyou don't even think of cleaning out.That closet stuffed with savage mementos.Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teethor worry if we're all eating cereal for dinneragain. Don't answer the telephone, ever,or weep over anything at all that breaks.Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartonsin the refrigerator. Accept new forms of lifeand talk to the deadwho drift in though the screened windows, who collectpatiently on the tops of food jars and books.Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anythingexcept what destroysthe insulation between yourself and your experienceor what pulls down or what strikes at or what shattersthis ruse you call necessity.”

“Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.”