Speak to Me of Home Quotes

“They laughed, and Daisy learned that sad laughter lands differently in the atmosphere than the regular kind.”
― Jeanine Cummins, Speak to Me of Home: A Novel

“She had three more weeks to be six years old, and though Ruth did not remember feeling sad before moving away from San Juan [to St. Louis], she was melancholy then upon discovering the unreliability of the sun's position in the sky, which she had never questioned before...She felt it was an injustice that a six year old child should be exposed to such a discovery.”
― Jeanine Cummins, Speak to Me of Home

“Eight weeks. That’s how long it took Daisy to grow up, never mind that her period would not show up until October. When she arrived in San Juan at the beginning of that summer, she’d been an anxious, small-voiced child. She’d been a kid like all others, glued to her phone, almost entirely defined by a constant thread of worry she didn’t even know existed. That worry was so continual, Daisy had failed to notice the way it sat heavy in her stomach in a fluttering pit. She hadn’t known it was possible to evict that sinking, frenetic feeling. She hadn’t known that the rod of tension usually bulleting down the back of her neck didn’t have to be there, until it was gone.”
― Jeanine Cummins, Speak to Me of Home: A Novel

“Without hesitation, she pressed her thumb against the apps until they began to wobble and, one at a time, she deleted each of them. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat. Gone.”
― Jeanine Cummins, Speak to Me of Home: A Novel

“Ruth grew up, as all previous generations had done for the breadth of human history, at a time when kids were expected to appease their parents. But then, when it was her turn to be the parent, she discovered that in the space of a few years, the balance had tipped entirely; her kids were not interested in appeasing her in the least. For Ruth and her peers, it was never going to be their turn.”
― Jeanine Cummins, Speak to Me of Home: A Novel