The House Girl Quotes

“Let your heart lead you, do not be afraid, for there will be much to regret if reason and sense and fear are your only markers”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Over the years she had learned to fold down rising emotion just as she would fold the clean bedsheets, the sheet growing smaller and tighter with each pass until all that remained of that wide wrinkled expanse of cotton was a hard closed-in square.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Just to sit for a moment, herself, no one claiming her time or her thoughts or the product of her mind and hands. What other word to call that if not freedom?”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Is it too much to wish for such a life? Is it too little?”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Truth was multilayered, shifting; it was different for everyone, each personal history carved unique from the same weighty block of time and flesh.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“If there is one lesson I wish to bestow upon you, one shred of wisdom I have gained from my living, dying days, it is this: let your heart lead you, do not be afraid, for there will be much to regret if reason and sense and fear are your only markers.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“There is a certain kind of man who is forever searching. He wanders from place to place, he looks hard into the eyes of women and men in every town, maybe he scratches the earth or wields a gun, remedies illnesses or writes books, and there is always a vague emptiness within him. It is the emptiness that drives him and he does not know even how to name that thing that might fill it. No idea of home or love or peace comes to him. He does not know, so he cannot stop. On and on he moves. and the emptiness blinds him and pulls at him and he is like a newborn baby searching for the teat, knowing it is there, but where?
And sometimes such a man is handed a gift. A gift of direction. A path that is marked for him and there, yes, this will ease your suffering, it is sure. This will cure you, it will fill you up, at least for a time. There will be a home, and love, there will no longer be the sorrow when you look at a cold night sky, the sorrow as the sun rises and the mist burns away.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Her life was her own, and a life could be a good one, or it could be one of an empty wishing for more, for something different.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“The things you can control and the things you cannot.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Why didn't Lina know their names? Why hadn't she studied their histories? Where was the monument? Where was the museum? What had they wished for and worked for and loved?”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Mister hit Josephine with the palm of his hand across her left cheek and it was then she knew she would run.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Why is it that we have nineteen Smithsonian museums--nineteen, one just for goddamn postage stamps--and not one is dedicated to memorializing those people who lived in bondage and helped build this country? We would not be the world's superpower today if we had not had two hundred and fifty years of free, limitless labor on which to build our economy. Why now, you ask? What were their names, Dan? They were our founding fathers and mothers just as much as the bewigged white men who laid the whip against their backs. Isn't it time this country made the effort to remember them? And to calculate how much we owe them? It is past time, my friend.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Here, if your patience held, you might see every person, not every person on the planet but everyone who mattered to you, past and future, and you might lock eyes or you might pass each other by and never know that chance had brought you once before in such proximity, close enough to touch. Lina loved that sense of possibility. The opening up of humanity, so many faces presented here in states of departing and arriving, each a perfectly contained, self-directed presence and yet vulnerable too to the the greater forces of timetables and weather, accidental looks, brushed hands, stumbles, the lost and found.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Each man carries with him imperfection and regret and day by day he strives to make right the wrongs he has committed, to repair what he has broken.

Let your heart lead you, do not be afraid, for there will be much to regret if reason and sense and fear are your only markers.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“There was no dream of Josephine’s that did not contain a place where she might sit and look upon a field or a bird in flight or a person and ponder the lines of that thing, to capture them in pencil or charcoal or ink or pigment. Just to sit for a moment, herself, no one claiming her time or her thoughts or the product of her mind and hands. What other word to call that if not freedom?”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“When you are older, you will, I hope, learn something of the world and understand that each man carries with him imperfection and regret, and day by day he strives to make right the wrongs he has committed, to repair what he has broken. This is what I have struggled to do, in ways human and flawed.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“across the porch and down the front steps to the dirt”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“I hope that wherever else I have failed, whatever harm I have caused to strangers and friends, that you may speak for me. Not before a pulpit or upon a stage. Not with words great or loud. But only to be, to persist, to live a life with pride and worth. In twenty years’ time, thirty, or forty I hope that you may sit upon the porch of your home, look out upon a greening field that you have tilled, see your children surrounding you with love, and think for a moment upon me. That is all now that I truly wish for. To be for a moment in your thoughts, when I have long passed from this earth, and perhaps in a way I may find my redemption, an earthly redemption, not everlasting, but scared nonetheless.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Did he invent them for my benefit, or for his own?”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“It struck Linda suddenly that this was the middle of the night. Even here, in the city that never slept, most people now were sleeping. Law firm time was like casino time, only instead of an endless cocktail hour it was always a neon-bright afternoon. The dead center of the workday, all night long.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Did the color of his skin matter? No, Lina decided, wouldn’t his racial ambiguity be a strength? Wasn’t this a history from which they had all emerged, every American, black and white and every shade in between?”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“The harder road. Because she was a woman? Because she was short? Because her law school ranked top-ten but not top-five? “Hey.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“There”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“It is a debasement to a man’s character to behave so brutally, Father said.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“dimly registered a thin blue rug”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“let your heart lead you, do not be afraid, for there will be much to regret if reason and sense and fear are your only markers.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“Those nights felt like this now: a creative energy, a limitless enthusiasm, a faith that talent and will and work would ultimately prevail, and a fatalistic wryness about the whole spectacle too-- *of course* we are all creative and interesting, *of course* everyone will know our names, but tomorrow and the next day and the next we must go to our low-paying jobs where we sit on stools or take orders for food or clean up messes that no one else wants to clean; at least tonight we can say we are artists.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl

“...Lina longed suddenly for a sliver of that must have been her mother's allure, and talent, and passion, and willingness to embrace her own complicated life.”
― Tara Conklin, The House Girl