As Close to Us as Breathing Quotes

“What about love?” My father laughed wearily. “Love is putting up with a whole lot. Putting up with it and feeling good about it. Howard, my son,” he said, gripping his shoulder, “that’s love.”
― Elizabeth Poliner, As Close to Us as Breathing

“Of the rules in this house, spoken and unspoken, ancient and new, religious and secular, visible and invisible - of the mob of rules that controlled a given moment - the one about sandy feet was perhaps the one most strictly enforced.”
― Elizabeth Poliner, As Close to Us as Breathing

“But such is the way of family: we are what they tell us we are, and part of life’s great struggle, it’s always seemed to me, is to know oneself despite that imposing collective definition.”
― Elizabeth Poliner, As Close to Us as Breathing

“different”
― Elizabeth Poliner, As Close to Us as Breathing

“Several times that afternoon my mother and Vivie walked through the living room, past the double doors leading to Bec’s sunporch, and they’d glance at us from the doorway with curiosity, even a longing, or so it seemed to me, to join us. But they’d made different life choices: they had no Singer, no vocation to speak of, no need for a bedroom that was as much a studio as a place to sleep. What would they do out there, even if we made the room to let them in? That afternoon it seemed clear to me that Bec’s sunporch was a world apart from Vivie’s and Ada’s, a world of our own, and though I wasn’t the intellectual that Nina so clearly already was, nor the master seamstress Bec was, I had a feeling that day that I was something, something, mere doodles and all, that even my own mother couldn’t understand.”
― Elizabeth Poliner, As Close to Us as Breathing

“It hadn't changed. To grasp that constancy was the point of roaming, room by room, through the cottage. And once we'd been assured of that indelible sameness, the unpacking could begin. Off went the remaining white sheets covering beds and dressers. Out came the vacuum to gather three seasons' worth of dust. There was the front porch to be swept clean and the kitchen table and counters to be wiped down.”
― Elizabeth Poliner, As Close to Us as Breathing

“Enjoy every walk,” Estelle breezily said, to which Nina nodded and replied, the follow-up by then rote, “because it was long in the making.” Everything”
― Elizabeth Poliner, As Close to Us as Breathing

“such is the way of family: we are what they tell us we are, and part of life’s great struggle, it’s always seemed to me, is to know oneself despite that imposing collective definition. That”
― Elizabeth Poliner, As Close to Us as Breathing

“As on the three days before, it astonished my father this morning how much peacefulness there was to family life, minus the family. As”
― Elizabeth Poliner, As Close to Us as Breathing

“A newer wave of immigrants were now telling their tales from whatever pockets of America they inhabited about huddling and separating and assimilating and holding on. Our story, in that sense, was over. And our cottage, too, was gone, had been sold long ago, ten years after the accident, when everyone finally realized they just didn’t want to go back anymore.”
― Elizabeth Poliner, As Close to Us as Breathing