Housemates Quotes

“Teaching? When it’s good? A marvel. A fucking miracle. They live, and then they turn to you to tell you about it.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, Housemates

“It is possible, I have found, to love something but forget about it for periods of several years or even longer when your mind is filled with a special kind of blankness or a particularly loud sort of noise. Sex can do it and so can grief. Also raising a child, I’ve heard, or caring for the aged, two things I never did because I was afraid of exactly this kind of forgetting. But, I think, even if forgotten, the thing you love is always there, running in the background. It takes energy to forget something you love that much, in a way that can leave you feeling perpetually tired and unused.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, Housemates

“It may be, I am thinking now, that whoever seems, on first blush, like the one who is the beloved is actually the lover. Whoever seems to love less, actually loves more, needs more love.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, Housemates

“It is a strange feeling to know that there is no man in this world to whom your body is sacred.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, Housemates

“Leah had a feeling then, a feeling she had been having more and more that winter: a strong sharp feeling of wanting to move, of wanting to be shoved through some rip in the fabric of life. What kept coming back was an image of an old ziplock bag containing cold sauce --tomato or similar-- getting squeezed by some fist until one of the corners burst and the sauce came splatting out. But did Leah want to be the sauce that splats, the fist that squeezes, or the bag that bursts? Didn't know.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, Housemates

“I too have often pondered the question of whether the ability to bridge the gap between OK art and great art can be taught. When asked if money could buy happiness, Van Halen musician David Lee Roth said no, “but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, Housemates

“To communicate in Leah’s family was to sit around the dinner table and argue, the purpose of which was to demonstrate how much or how little you knew. You ate your food and you picked a position and you put on your armor, and you prepared to defend yourself to the death, which was what losing meant.”
― Emma Copley Eisenberg, Housemates