The House Girl
Tara Conklin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Let your heart lead you, do not be afraid, for there will be much to regret if reason and sense and fear are your only markers”
“Over the years she had learned to fold down rising emotion just as she would fold the clean bedsheets, the sheet growing smaller and tighter with each pass until all that remained of that wide wrinkled expanse of cotton was a hard closed-in square.”
“Just to sit for a moment, herself, no one claiming her time or her thoughts or the product of her mind and hands. What other word to call that if not freedom?”
“Is it too much to wish for such a life? Is it too little?”
“Truth was multilayered, shifting; it was different for everyone, each personal history carved unique from the same weighty block of time and flesh.”
“If there is one lesson I wish to bestow upon you, one shred of wisdom I have gained from my living, dying days, it is this: let your heart lead you, do not be afraid, for there will be much to regret if reason and sense and fear are your only markers.”
“There is a certain kind of man who is forever searching. He wanders from place to place, he looks hard into the eyes of women and men in every town, maybe he scratches the earth or wields a gun, remedies illnesses or writes books, and there is always a vague emptiness within him. It is the emptiness that drives him and he does not know even how to name that thing that might fill it. No idea of home or love or peace comes to him. He does not know, so he cannot stop. On and on he moves. and the emptiness blinds him and pulls at him and he is like a newborn baby searching for the teat, knowing it is there, but where? And sometimes such a man is handed a gift. A gift of direction. A path that is marked for him and there, yes, this will ease your suffering, it is sure. This will cure you, it will fill you up, at least for a time. There will be a home, and love, there will no longer be the sorrow when you look at a cold night sky, the sorrow as the sun rises and the mist burns away.”
“Did the color of his skin matter? No, Lina decided, wouldn’t his racial ambiguity be a strength? Wasn’t this a history from which they had all emerged, every American, black and white and every shade in between?”
“Why didn't Lina know their names? Why hadn't she studied their histories? Where was the monument? Where was the museum? What had they wished for and worked for and loved?”
“When you are older, you will, I hope, learn something of the world and understand that each man carries with him imperfection and regret, and day by day he strives to make right the wrongs he has committed, to repair what he has broken. This is what I have struggled to do, in ways human and flawed.”
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Book Keywords:
searching, sorrow, forgotten-history, heritage, slaves, emptiness
