Safe as Houses Quotes

“Seeing his face after months was as immediate as a pointed gun.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“When you're alone, you are in the right place to watch sadness approach like storm clouds over an open field. You can sit in a chair and get ready for it. As it moves through you, you can reach out your hands and feel all the edges. When it passes and you can drink coffee again you even miss it because it has been loyal to you like a boyfriend.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“Once in a while, I smell Clive on my skin and it stops my day. It's a train crossing; I wait to pass. Eventually the lights stop flashing, the barriers lift. I keep moving.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“They hurt me, these small, brutal kindnesses.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“Marcel was from Louisiana, so for four years Emily had been southern by association. She insisted on Lynchburg Lemonades. She scheduled interviews around the Gators. She championed gentility. Anyone at a dinner party who thought they could tell a joke making fun of the region encountered a faceful of Emily, quick and ferocious as a convert, as a woman who loved a man.
Emily now had no claim to the South. The region and its interests would proceed without her.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“A monkey could do my job better and with more hilarious results.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“I am bad at asking for help. When you ask a human being for help, there is a chance they will say later, Remember when you asked for help? Can I have five dollars? That goes for medicine, too. I don't like asking help from pills in a bottle. I don't want to be woken up at night by a tab of aspirin asking to borrow five dollars.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“He's dead now and by dead I mean dating a stripper.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“That can be the cruelest part of happiness--its tendency to disguise itself as boredom.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“Bob Dylan never has his own cigarettes. I thought this was charming at first.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“We stand at the doors and look out over the yard. Hundreds of deer gaze back at us. Deer and deer and deer and deer and deer. Their blue chests heave in the dark. Their trembling cotton throats.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“I am quitting a boy like some people quit smoking. I am not quitting smoking.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“Maybe God gets nervous in places like this, the way I feel in restaurants with linen napkins, because if he does exist, I don't feel him here.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“Tonight, the Sisters of Saint Joseph and I are going to The Slaughterhouse Bar. I have four rolls of quarters and we are going to dance until there's blood in our slippers.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“That they can really haul is what most people don't know about wild turkeys.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses

“He had always listened to the music of a more sensitive man. She had let several relationship cruelties slide because of it.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses