Last House Quotes

“Container ships guzzle fossil fuels to transport cheap plastic toys and electronics across oceans to nations where they are discarded and tossed into vast, off-gassing landfills that poison groundwater and contribute to glacial ice melt. Poverty makes people fat, and wealth makes them unhappy. People drive themselves to gyms to walk in place and watch TV.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“Somehow, despite all the ways his life had molded him to be hard, he remained open to the soft, delicate underbelly of experience that makes us human, to the small irrational fears as well as the bold principles and truths. He was good at that, my father. He was capable of both.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“I hate the Hudson Valley. Everyone loves it now, the artsy shops and rambling farmhouses occupied by Brooklynites making their own artisanal beer, jam, and pickles. That would have been Harry if he were alive, not in Brooklyn but in some run-down upstate town, making the cider vinegar he was so excited about. There’s a particular sadness lurking beneath the surface of those towns. Take a step back from the charming renovated main streets with their cafés and knitting shops and you’re in the heart of meth-land, of derelict textile mills and workers’ housing, sagging porches and weeds as tall as children. The shiny artisanal present is nothing more than a hasty coat of paint. And the past is heavy with decayed trappings of an American dream, textile fortunes made and lost, middle-class towns established and extinguished in only a few generations. I had a friend who studied Native American history and she wouldn’t set foot in that part of the world. “You can still smell the slaughter,” she’d said.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“Later, after the terrible flight home, the jumbled shock and violent grief, the vomiting in airport wastebaskets, and the crushing, hopeful moments of disbelief, Nick would think of those days leading up to the party. He would think of the horror of that moment in the tent, redolent with decay, the wine and the peacock corpses and brandy, the foie gras and sweaty perfume. His chest would constrict with an echo of panic, and he’d wonder what Harry had been doing at the same time, imagine him in the Vermont predawn cool, the smell of trees and grass and the mud of the lake, pressing his lips together in concentration just as he had done when he went fishing as a boy—and Nick would send his soul or spirit or maybe it was his will back through time and space to the baby Nick had gone to when he cried out from night terrors, screaming, insensible, neither asleep nor awake. Nick would carry him into the kitchen and give him a biscuit or a spoonful of ice cream, something to bring him back to himself. In his arms, the boy would grow calm. His breaths would slow, his tears would dry. And he would make his way from one world to the next.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“So much of parenting was about loss, people said. And she had thought it meant loss of herself, loss of control as your children grew up, loss as they moved out and on with their lives, and certainly there was that. But that wasn’t the real stick of it. You lost those little people that you loved, and you didn’t even know it until suddenly you looked back at a photo or a memory and realized they were gone—absolutely vanished. Time took them. You couldn’t reach out and hold their hands when they were afraid or smooth their brows when they worried. Their hands were something else now—bigger, tougher—their brows pimpled or wrinkled, broader. Poof! They had metamorphosed, and the metamorphosis was not the lovely, benign process you were taught in school, caterpillar to butterfly, but a seemingly sudden erasure and replacement.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“My father said his grim and ponderous Midwestern grace, passed the mint jelly, picked up his heavy silver cutlery. I imagined any number of people from my normal New York life seeing me with the spoils of corporate oil money. I made derisive comments, but I ate heartily.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“You know what oil is? The compressed corpses of once-living things- plants, animals, dinosaurs, microbial shit. You know what that means about every jet that flies across the ocean? Every car and train and truck, every plastic bottle and latex glove and pair of polyester pants? They're all full of ghosts.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“Was that what it all came down to? Speaking about democracy and progress, but meaning power and riches?”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“She did not grasp that she was on the top floor of a great complicated structure with her lofty ideals, while he was in the basement, stoking the boiler, making sure she would not freeze to death...All the peace and plenty they had grown up with wasn't given - it was protected by a sheath of young men's bones strewn across Europe and the Pacific.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“Civilization was such a fragile thing. Nick believed this with an anxious conviction. He had seen it break down. And if one knew how brittle it was, how delicate and improbable its framework, one was particularly bound to uphold it. The charade of strength and durability was vital to its existence.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“Civilization was such a fragile thing. Nick believed this with an anxious conviction. He had seen it break down. And if one knew how brittle it was, how delicate and improbable its framework, one was particularly bound to uphold it.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“How will it work when everyone is exactly equal?” my mother wanted to know. “Is there enough, really, to go around?” I was appalled by this sentiment, so chauvinist, racist, survivalist. I railed at her about the capitalist racket, the smallness of her Depression-era mindset (“But I don’t have a mindset,” she protested. “I have questions”). She was a good sport about it, really, mild-mannered in the face of my patronizing. But she persisted: Wouldn’t there always be some way people sorted themselves? If it wasn’t race or gender or class, would it be intelligence? Physical strength? Blood type? Weren’t there always bound to be haves and have-nots on account of finite resources? The constraints of weather and geography, for instance? Who got the high ground with fertile soil versus who got the desert? I think she honestly wanted to discuss this, but to me she sounded like a social Darwinist. I could see things only in oppositional terms. Today I’d love to have this conversation with her. I have an answer: The process of working toward greater equality is the point. The medium is the message. The journey is the destination. Something like that. It’s the effort to make life more equal, more bearable for everyone, that counts. And if we don’t try, what are we left with? A lifetime of showing off our most selfish instincts, protecting our own little slice of whatever it is we want—power, money, resources, the best seats on the bus. Life may be filled with struggle but what you struggle for is what matters. And if it’s only your own survival, you’re no better than the dinosaurs.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“I was now a woman in my own right, and being a daughter in the presence of my mother diminished that. So”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“Meanwhile, Harry managed to get along with Huff. Harry could get along with anyone. He figured people out and gave them what they wanted simply by exposing that part of himself. His success, like all good chameleons’, stemmed from rearrangement, not phoniness.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House

“Night as it had been in the Pacific returned to Nick—the stars obscured by humidity, the air thick, the specific papery rustle of wind in the palms. The sharp feel of danger, a prickle along his skin even when he slept. On the islands he would never have paused, stilled by indecision, in the middle of an open space. Even now, remembering, he had to remind his heart it did not need to race. He was in America, in Connecticut, in his own house. But for a moment it was almost as if he missed the dense, unquiet Pacific night.”
― Jessica Shattuck, Last House