The Yellow House Quotes

“Distance lends perspective, but it can also shade, misinterpret.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“when a person dies in a place they become the place and nothing is ever the same again.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“Remembering is a chair that it is hard to sit still in.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“The mythology of New Orleans—that it is always the place for a good time; that its citizens are the happiest people alive, willing to smile, dance, cook, and entertain for you; that it is a progressive city open to whimsy and change—can sometimes suffocate the people who live and suffer under the place’s burden, burying them within layers and layers of signifiers, making it impossible to truly get at what is dysfunctional about the city.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“And she knew, above all, how to work, which is always the beginning of fashioning a self.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“Who has the rights to the story of a place? Are these rights earned, bought, fought and died for? Or are they given? Are they automatic, like an assumption? Self-renewing? Are these rights a token of citizenship belonging to those who stay in the place or to those who leave and come back to it? Does the act of leaving relinquish one’s rights to the story of a place? Who stays gone? Who can afford to return?”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“We own what belongs to us whether we claim it or not.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“The house's disappearance from the landscape was not different from my father's absence. His was a sudden erasure for my mother and siblings, a prolonged and present absence for me, an intriguing story with an ever-expanding middle that never drew to a close. The house held my father inside of it, preserved; it bore his traces. As long as the house stood, containing these remnants, my father was not yet gone. And then suddenly, he was.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“Don’t tell stories” when she means don’t tell lies. I keep trying to know the difference.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“She favored the moment, knew how remembering the past could elicit despair.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“...the house was not tethered to its foundation, that what held the house to its foundation of sill on piers, wood on bricks, was the weight of us all in the house, the weight of the house itself, the weight of our things in the house. This is the only explanation I want to accept.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“Remembering hurts, but forgetting is Herculean.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“Water has a perfect memory,” Toni Morrison has said, “and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“Storms of all sorts, were facts of our lives. Those images shown on the news of fellow citizens drowned, abandoned, and calling for help were not news to us, but still further evidence of what we long ago. I knew, for example, that we lived in an unequal, masquerading world when I was eight and crossing the dangerous Chef Menteur Highway with Alvin. I knew it at Livingston Middle School when I did not learn because no one was teaching me. I knew it in 1994, when we were petrified, afraid, the law might kill us—knew it before, during, and after the Water. Katrina's postscript—the physical wasteland—was only a manifestation of all that ailed me and my family in mind and spirit.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“When you are babiest in a family with eleven older points of view, eleven disparate rallying cries, eleven demanding and pay-attention-to-me voices—all variations of the communal story—developing your own becomes a matter of survival. There can be, in this scenario, no neutral ground.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“Dresses you might wear for special occasions she wore every day. In this way she and Joseph were alike. They dressed to be seen, which is how it came to be that they built up a reputation for floor showing, as Uncle Joe calls it. “Yeah, we knew we looked good.” They danced wherever there was a floor—a bar or a ball. The sidewalk, sometimes. “We used to go in clubs and start dancing from the door. For a poor man I used to dress my can off,” he says. “That’s what used to get me in so much trouble and thing with the ladies.” He and his baby sister, Ivory, would swing it out, jitterbugging and carrying on. Ivory was always fun and always light on her feet. She was especially gifted at being led and men generally loved this quality in her.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“By this time in their lives, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory were like lil maids, waking up and making their beds first thing, sweeping and dusting, the house would be shining. We were brought up with cleanliness. All of Lolo’s children knew how to clean, including the boy. “Guess who be out there windin’ them clothes through that wringer? Your big uncle,” Uncle Joe told me. When two of Lolo’s friends whom the children called Aunt Ruth and Aunt Agnes arrived at Roman Street for the annual Mardi Gras and Nursing Club balls, Joseph, Elaine, and Ivory pressed their gowns and laid them out on the bed for the women to slip into after they had taken their baths. When they returned from their parties, they found lamplit rooms, their slippers by turned-down beds, their nightclothes already laid out for them.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“My siblings were all grown, most of them married, returning to the Yellow House for visits and for the lows, the in-between times natural to every life. Troy had left for marriage and had three children, but he, too, had come back after divorce and was living again in the crown of the house where he had grown up.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“There would come a time when I would know very well the man who would stay in that house long after its charm had faded. Everything that I am writing here now leads to that.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“She was contained but occasionally mercurial. She could go off on you in a split second. When the presentation of the body stands in for all the qualities the world claims you cannot possess, some people call you elegant. Grandmother was that, yes, but sometimes elegance is just willpower and grace, a way to keep the flailing parts of the self together.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“fragile things had to be handled a certain way. They were the kinds of objects that slowed you down, could take some of the crass out of you.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“The things we have forgotten are housed. Our soul is an abode and by remembering houses and rooms, we learn to abide within ourselves. Gaston Bachelard”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“Shame is a slow creeping. The most powerful things are quietest, if you think about it. Like water.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“we are beating you because you did a wrong thing as a grown man, because you hurt our mother who we love more than anything, because we can beat sense into you and addiction out of you even though of course we cannot, because if we do not beat you someone else will beat you to death and this will destroy us, too.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (for the fifth time), Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, and James Baldwin’s Evidence of Things Not Seen. My letters were full of quotations from”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“I did not yet understand the psychic cost of defining oneself by the place where you are from.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“like Alvin is dead, or the house is gone. Look like nothing was ever there.”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House

“Leaving home, I had learned, meant a loss of the illusion of control. You could never know all that happened when your back was turned, which, ironically, is the appeal of leaving, too. What the gone-away-from-home person learns are not the details that compose a life, but the headlines—”
― Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House