The Hundred-Year House Quotes

“By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House

“The whole damn century would've made more sense backwards. Where we ended is worse than where we began.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House

“If the house hadn’t been a mansion, if the death hadn’t been a suicide, if Violet Devohr’s dark, refined beauty hadn’t smoldered down from that massive oil portrait, it wouldn’t have been a ghost story at all. Beauty and wealth, it seems, get you as far in the afterlife as they do here on earth. We can’t all afford to be ghosts.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House

“We aren't haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we'd be to them.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House

“Someone had once told her that if a man sees the line of a woman’s suntan—the strip of white peeking out beneath the strap of her bathing suit or the collar of her dress—he’ll fall in love with her. Because he will believe he’s seen her truest self, raw and pale, something no other man knows. And this was the reason she’d fallen in love with George: She could see the desperate nerves beneath the bluster.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House

“For a ghost story, the tale of Violet Saville Devohr was vague and underwhelming. She had lived, she was unhappy, and she died by her own hand somewhere in that vast house. If the house hadn't been a mansion, if the death hadn't been a suicide, if Violet Devohr's dark, refined beauty hadn't smouldered down from that massive oil portrait, it wouldn't have been a ghost story at all. Beauty and wealth, it seems, get you as far in the afterlife as they do here on earth. We can't all afford to be ghosts.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House

“She turned her tiramisu slab on its side to cut it better. She had nearly forgotten who she was.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House

“If everything else were still the same, he'd have felt Zee's absence like a gaping hole. But if he could continue to reconfigure his entire life, there would be no missing place where Zee had been.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House

“Eddie was so controlled, so careful. His eyes, though -- the way they pulsed around the room and then back to your face -- it was as if they were taking in everything with such tremendous force, such thirst. A good chance this was the reason for his quiet. There was so much pouring in that nothing could come out.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House

“But here at Laurelfield, there was something more in the mornings, a buzzing sensation about the whole house, as if it weren't the servants keeping it running but some other energy. As if the house had roots and leaves and was busy photosynthesizing and sending sap up and down, and the people running through were as insignificant as burrowing beetles.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House