Welcome Home, Stranger Quotes

“I take another deep inhale, enough air to contain the words I need these people to hear. “My sister has devoted her entire life, all her beauty and grace and charm, to the well-being of you three lucky people. But you need to understand something. No one taught her how to do this. She had to do it all from scratch. She came from the most neglected, deprived childhood you can imagine. Trust me, I know. We had none of this growing up.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“Decency, the fundamental trustworthy drive to do what’s needed, what’s right and good for the world, a quality so ordinary and dull that it’s taken for granted, even mocked, until it’s in short supply. Like oxygen or water.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“Halfway across, I take a break and lie on my back, making slow snow-angel patterns with my arms and legs in the water to stay afloat, looking up at the clouds. The sky is pure intense blue, with little fleecy puffs of white floating through it. The smell of the water, alive with animal and plant and mineral matter, bacteria and microbes and algae and decomposed life, penetrates deep into the most ancient folds of my brain. I’m part of it, and it’s part of me.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“Here I am, still attending to this body I live in, dragging it forth into yet another day.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“Craning my neck back, I look up at the stars, the splashy arc of the Milky Way, and feel a detachment so profound it’s like I’m untethered, floating.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I stare up at the darkening sky, watch stars pop out in pinlights. The funny bent tip-tops of hemlocks are silhouetted against the sky like shaggy wizard hats.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“It’s disorienting to be suddenly inside, almost like walking into another person’s head, after being alone out in the wild woods all day.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“If I die here, my body will become useful as food and mulch. It can feed the insects, the worms, and then I’ll be part of all of this, too. Okay then.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“The lumps of granite look like friendly gnomes; powdery bark curls off the birches’ trunks, heavy rich paper engraved with rust-colored lines like a wedding invitation; the ferns are comical, elegant hairdos on invisible heads. So I’m lost in the woods, oh well.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“This reminds me of my entire childhood, which I survived by manufacturing this same sanguine, irrational buoyancy in the face of grim hopelessness.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I’ve lost track of time—the path runs into an open meadow full of wildflowers, purple and pink, yellow and orange. The bright air is perfumed with floral smells so strong they’re trippy, almost three-dimensional.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“At the bottom of the meadow, I find the path along the lake. I plunge into the woods and am instantly in a different world, a cohesive world of greens and browns, trees shifting and rustling in the hazy sunlight that filters down through the leaves. The ground is damp and spongy underfoot with pine needles and thick green lichen, rotted fallen logs covered in moss. The rippling sunlit lake to my left reflects sideways so the tree trunks seem to be the narrow screens for a watery, out-of-focus movie.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“We were mortified by our mother back then. We did not appreciate her idiosyncratic dignity, her preening flamboyance, her dogged zest to experience life to the fullest.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“The shore is a dense wall of bristling pines and hemlocks thronged up to the very edge of the water and stretching back for hundreds of miles in every direction, interrupted only by clear-cuts. And here we are, two tiny fleas on a teardrop in the middle of it all with our dead mother’s incinerated flesh and bones.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I feel Celeste’s footsteps on the boards before she appears with two mugs and hands one to me. “Are you ready to do this?” We slug our coffee and set our mugs on the dock.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I lie still for a few minutes, listening to a loud splashing on the lake, followed by the high, echoing call of a loon.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“But the air smells like pine needles and cold metal. The bedsprings make a rusty sound when I turn over. I don’t have to launch myself toward the coffee maker and drive to Annapolis. I don’t have to go to work ever again. They’re all there without me, carrying on.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“we’re guests like anyone else. Only Willie and Jean belong here. They both look as if they emerged from this place, were formed of the same rough planks, have become molecularly inseparable from it.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“The tightly hinged screen door gives that old familiar slap behind me as I traipse back up to the lodge,”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“There is no signal up here, not one bar. No access to anyone but the people here, no possibility of email or messages for two days.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“The woods press thickly all around the shore.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“miles of scruffy woods punctuated with double-wide mobile homes and run-down capes set in small clearings, yards littered with old machinery and junked cars and tarp-covered woodpiles and rusty swing sets.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I stand on the broad clifftop that overlooks the Fore River estuary, its industrial warehouses lit up below me, and, beyond it, the wooded glacial floodplain that stretches west toward the faint black shape of the White Mountains on the horizon. I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry at the desperate absurdity of this world and my place in it.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“pretty young Maine girls, just like I used to be. They may not see me, but I see them, their innocent, arrogant power and youth, the joys of being glossy and fertile, all their major mistakes and disappointments and compromises and missed opportunities still to come, unimaginable to them now.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“trying to envision the world through her nose, the layers of sidewalk-level smells, footprints and other dogs’ pee and shit and old funky food, the dirt coming to life after the rain, the carcasses of insects, acrid stink of cigarette butts, all the dust and detritus of a city.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“The cadence of this conversation feels comfortable and familiar, the staccato recital of facts that passes for an exchange of deepest intimacies in this part of the world.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“Up close, even with his eyes closed, his body gives off an electrical charge, like the threatening zing in the air right before a storm.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I’m hung over again. It’s a breezy, sparkling-fresh blue-green-gold morning, a Maine maritime almost-summer day. I left the windows open all night to let fresh air pour in and blow the polyurethane fumes out.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“I know I should get up and brush my teeth and get into pajamas, but the ongoing care and upkeep of my body is so much trouble, all that repetitive eating and voiding and breathing and washing and dressing, over and over and over. And for what? I fantasize about ribbons of algae undulating in the sunlit ocean, photosynthesizing away.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger

“drinking must have been her only means of lifting herself out of the truth, blunting its edges. Drunk, she could swan about in the pearly light of fantasy. Of course sobriety was impossible for her to sustain. Without alcohol, she eventually had to face who she was.”
― Kate Christensen, Welcome Home, Stranger