True Places Quotes

“Everyone was in a hurry, which didn’t make any sense, considering food was simple to get, no one had to make a fire to keep warm, and water flowed through the buildings, ready wherever you needed it.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“She had given herself away. If she wanted herself back, there had to be pieces of her, sacred and proprietary, that no one else could ever have.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Sometimes it takes a stranger to show you what should be obvious, how far you’ve drifted from who you want to be, from what’s right for you, your true place.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“they always seemed to be halfway out the door, in their minds anyway. Iris hadn’t seen a single person completely absorbed in what they were doing.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Everyone felt too much and not enough at the same time.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“That was, in fact, what time was: a narrow container for a relentless succession of tasks. The container could not be expanded, but the tasks could multiply exponentially. In fact, tasks were guaranteed to multiply.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“WEED: A PLANT THAT GROWS WHERE IT ISN’T WANTED.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Remembering herself as a confident mother evoked a feeling akin to grasping at the vestiges of a wonderful dream. The futility of the attempt only served to emphasize the magnitude of the loss.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Iris came to the conclusion that keeping secrets and telling lies was the only way people could manage their complicated lives.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Suzanne understood there were three options for dealing with time pressure. Option One: Perform tasks more efficiently. Move faster, triple-task, cut corners. Buy cookies instead of making them from scratch, and ignore the raised eyebrows or direct complaints from better, more efficient mothers. Drive faster and risk a speeding ticket with scheduling repercussions rippling for days afterward. Text at stoplights but not in front of the kids. Sleep less.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“No one gives in without giving something up, and nothing is given up without cost.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“That was, in fact, what time was: a narrow container for a relentless succession of tasks.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“but what Suzanne didn’t say was that parents have less control than they think, that what they try to do for their children is sometimes not enough, not nearly.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“If she had to live without a stream or a river, she, too, would become hard and thorny.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“It might have already happened; the answers to most of life’s pressing questions could simply be googled.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Sometimes it takes a stranger to show you what should be obvious, how far you’ve drifted from who you want to be, from what’s right for you, your true place”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“We can temper the compulsion to see ourselves. We can opt to reject the boundary, the shell behind which we operate our lives, separate from the world, the world of dirt and leaf and sky in which we evolved, the true place that holds our essential nature. We can step out from behind the glass, and live.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“We are not meant to see ourselves so clearly; nor are we meant to be eternally reflected in others. It is far better, and undoubtedly the natural order of things to be not only blind to ourselves, but oblivius.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“We are not meant to see ourselves so clearly; nor are we meant to be eternally reflected in others. It is far better, and undoubtedly the natural order of things, Suzanne thought, to be not only blind to ourselves, but oblivious.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Whit and she had started dating when Suzanne was living at home because she couldn’t hold down a job. Her anxiety was debilitating and she had trouble focusing. Antianxiety meds smoothed over the cracks, but the cracks were still there. Suzanne felt she might have a panic attack, collapse, at any moment. Whit calmed her, got her away from her parents, but now it occurred to her she might have simply traded one cage for another.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“You have everything. You have every privilege imaginable. You don’t have the right to throw things away, to be mediocre.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“The girl waited by the stream Mama would cross on her way home. Idle and hungry, she ate all the watercress she’d collected to have with the turkey; all that remained were a few ramps. Ash told her the story about the time he climbed a tree and came nose to nose with a porcupine. When he finished, she was restless. She drank from the stream and headed for the ridge in the direction of the rifle shot”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Nurse Amy fiddled with the tubes and bags and machines, then went into the small room and reached behind a white tarp hanging from a pole. Iris heard water falling. Where did it come from? How did it get up into the tower? She and Ash would divert the stream to irrigate something they were growing, or just for fun, but they never beat gravity”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Whit found Suzanne stretched out on the chaise in their bedroom, laptop perched on her thighs. She had changed into her end-of-the-day outfit: yoga pants and one of his T-shirts, an ancient Bucknell one today. Whit, normally possessive, made an exception for her appropriation of his clothing; it was an intimacy that felt easy and right”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Suzanne rejoined the parkway and drove fast, neglecting to decelerate into the corners, jerking the steering wheel to feel the car hitch a little, like a prodded animal. She didn’t cross the line to recklessness but did wish the road were twistier, her car more able to tuck nimbly into the turns. The Navigator had been Whit’s idea, and she hadn’t cared enough to disagree. She’d come to appreciate the very tanklike qualities she used to resent”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Option Three: Refuse to perform. This radical notion rarely surfaced, because Suzanne was so accustomed to being busy. Everyone she knew was busy; it was something they talked about as they caught up on emails at a swim meet or texted takeout orders to their husbands while waiting for prescriptions at CVS. Being busy was a by-product of the life she had chosen with her husband, Whit, although if she was perfectly honest, she wasn’t sure the word chosen was accurate. Once their kids had started school, it was more like jumping into a fast-flowing river. You didn’t choose. You swam to keep from drowning. Suzanne was an excellent swimmer”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Suzanne lowered both front windows to combat the overbearing sweetness of the sixty hyacinths in the rear of the Navigator. She’d been delighted when the nursery offered potted plants as a donation for the Boosters auction, but she’d been told they would be tulips or daffodils. A single hyacinth in full bloom could send its scent to every corner of a moderate-size home; no one would be able to breathe, much less eat, with sixty blooming hyacinths in the Boar’s Head ballroom. If the flowers could be wrapped in cellophane, it might be tolerable. She couldn’t remember what they’d decided about packaging and presentation at the meeting last week. Fifty decisions at that meeting, plus a hundred more at two others—one for the faculty appreciation lunch and another for the food bank.”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“He wiped his feet on the mat, stepped into the entry, and dropped his keys and briefcase on the side table next to the piano. His son, Reid, was descending the double staircase from the left, wearing, as usual, jeans and an Indian-style gauze shirt with a tab collar and flowing hem. The shirt was a solid, businessman blue, leaving an impression that was both too formal and too bohemian. As Whit had told his son too many times, fashion speaks volumes, and this fashion choice would prevent Reid from being taken seriously. At seventeen, it was something he needed to consider, pronto”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“A girl appeared at Suzanne’s side, the tallest girl Iris had ever seen, and nearly naked, wearing only tiny black shorts and a top made of two triangles and some string. It was a warm day, especially for April, and Iris could see why the girl wouldn’t want to wear a lot of clothes. But Nurse Amy had explained to her about modesty—rules about what to show when. Iris must have misunderstood. The girl’s body was strong and didn’t have a scar or bruise that Iris could see. She seemed to have been created just this morning”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places

“Iris nodded. After she had tried to leave the hospital, Nurse Amy told her she couldn’t disappear into the wilderness even if she could find her way there, which she wasn’t sure she could, and even if she was strong enough, which she wasn’t. People would look for her, bring her back. But this was the first Iris had heard about going somewhere else. For all she knew, she would just be moving from this bed to another one, trading one cage for the next. It was easy inside the cage; she was taken care of, fed, kept clean and warm, but all the comfort in the world couldn’t blur her desire to return to the life she’d left behind. Frustration, longing, and despair gnawed at her insides, and she took refuge in the coloring book”
― Sonja Yoerg, True Places