The House Next Door Quotes

“Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“The room was bright and white and still and silent, but soundless sound roared and howled in it.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“You wouldn't maintain a house like that' you'd feet it and water it. You'd have to give it nourishment and love it to keep it alive and healthy.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“Forsythia that I thought had been dozed into oblivion sprang up and misted the foundations with lemon icing I yearn for all winter.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“...and I thought I might take him home and see how he works. It's really neat the way all those little bone things fit together, like a zipper.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“Walter and I are very fond of some children, but not across the board, not as a species. No”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“I found this guy standing out on the lawn admiring his handiwork,' Lucas Abbott said. 'I thought he was rooted to the ground...I didn't know architects got opening-night nerves.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“In short we feel that it would be fatal for anyone else to occupy that house.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“Buddy and Pie did not remain faceless long. We had faces, last names, and nearly intact genealogies for them both the very next day.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“But there’s something else wrong; there’s something in this house I didn’t put here. I can feel it, I can hear it talking to me, but I can’t understand what it’s saying. If I could, I think I’d know what was wrong with me…. Colquitt, it’s just all gone. I’m not going to get it back.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“It was not so much a peculiar question as a peculiar time to ask it. These small ritual sniffings—the finding of slots and niches for each other—are usually accomplished in the first few moments of conversation, pontoons laid down, one by one, in the bridge that will lead to friendship, or away from it. The lapse of time and space around his question gave it an odd portent.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“What do you think you could buy me that will replace what you gave away that was mine?,”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“If it was an old house, I’d almost think it was haunted, but who ever heard of a haunted contemporary less than a year old?”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“The pretty is part of it of course. That’s its draw. That’s the bait.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“It is damned, that house. It’s a greedy house. It takes. You said once, Col, that it would bring out the best in whoever lived there. You were wrong. It takes the best. It took that miserable Pie’s kid, and her marriage, and her daddy. It took that poor sonofabitch Buddy’s whole future. It took that Abbott guy’s future. It’s taking Anita Sheehan’s sanity—I know damned well there was more to her little ‘setback’ than you told me, Col—and it took my talent. And tonight it almost took you and Walter away from each other for good. Don’t you see that? Don’t either of you see that?”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“There were depths of sadness in her eyes, sadness that would look out at the world as long as the eyes did. But the same sadness looks out of many eyes, and they are still able to dance and spark with anger and quicken with love and tenderness. Anita’s eyes could do all of those things, and would. Were, already.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“Can you ever really fix things that have been broken once? I thought you could, but I was crazy for a long time, you know.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“The other things—they’re explainable in a terrible kind of way, aren’t they? Products of the weaknesses, the flaws in those people. I know they happened; I’ve no quarrel with that. I know you’re not liars or sensation seekers; you know I know it. But they’re not news. And what it all adds up to, what you think it adds up to—a malignant house, a haunted house, if you will—that’s Halloween stuff at best. It’s a nasty story; the hair stood up on my neck listening to you. But it is a story; any of it, all of it could be put down to coincidence, grisly and one-in-a-million as it is. Don’t you see that? It’s too awful even to make a feature of.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“Chaos, violence, disorder, mindlessness all upset us. They do not frighten us, precisely, because we are aware of them.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“I become dim and shriveled, somehow, at my very core if I am away from the sea too long.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door

“The bluff heartiness, the posturing, the inflamed face, the badinage were missing. He was gray-white and his eyes were swollen and bloodshot.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, The House Next Door