The Homemade God Quotes

“It’s not only themselves that the dead take away. They take a part of us, too: when living, they are inside us, and without them we carry a vacant space.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“We’re like birds in a nest. We want to love our siblings, yet we need to boot them out. I want to be with them, but I can’t. I want to leave them, and I can’t do that”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“She didn’t want him in a clean shirt with a funny goatee, drinking tea for his health; she wanted him covered with paint, so much paint it was in his ears, barking out insults and pouring too much red wine.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“He rooted through his pockets and pulled out a photo-booth headshot, which he smoothed with his fingertips as if he expected it to break into a smile.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“Like a ghost, he moves through the villa he knew so well—all those frescoed rooms, the glasshouse filled with lemon trees, the music salon with its ten harps that no one could play—until at last he finds Netta hunting for a phone signal in her giant straw hat, or Susan shining with sweat in the kitchen against a background of green majolica tiles, or Iris leaving food for the stray cat, and it’s strange how content it makes him feel, how secure and happy.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“Or on a clear day the water was a piece of glass with a deep-blue sky inside it,”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“Family is everything,” he says another time. “Even when it falls apart.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“It still amazes and thrills him that such a thing can happen. That another man can love Goose in equal proportion to the amount he loves him. He always assumed this kind of happiness was for other people.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“The fact is,” she said”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“I am in love. I am in love. And the man I love”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“He had grasped that silence wasn’t about nothing: It might be about waiting. And he knew that to find what he needed to say”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“It’s not only themselves that the dead take away. They take a part of us”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“Death does not come in our own time. It does not check our diaries for a free window”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“And this was how he learned a new truth about love. You can be overmastered by the most powerful feelings for a person”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“The fact is,” she said, “we’re all born. We’re all going to die. So the only interesting question is what we choose to do with the middle.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God

“Traveling toward the dead, it turned out, was not like traveling at all. Because how could you move toward someone who was not there? It was a no-win kind of journey, where the end point was not a gain but a subtraction. A nothing that opened out into more and more nothing.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Homemade God