The Golden State Quotes

“...motherhood is not a house you live in but a warren of beautiful rooms, something like Topkapi … some well-trod but magnificent place you’re only allowed to sit in for a minute and snap a photo before you are ushered out.”
― Lydia Kiesling, The Golden State

“To have a child is to court loss.”
― Lydia Kiesling, The Golden State

“The drive is supposed to take six and a half hours but somehow we have been on the road for eight when we come to the wooden sign sunk into grass that signifies the entrance to Deakins Park, and although Honey is still caterwauling, passing the sign feels like entering protected land, something apart from the ravages of the town. It sounds like hair-splitting to parse the varieties of mobile home, like something only a person obsessed about imperceptible class minutia would do, but there are mobile homes and mobile homes and despite how mortified Mom and I used to be by the fact that her parents lived in a mobile home now I happen to think Deakins Park is just as nice if not nicer than many a suburban cul-de-sac of for example the Nut Tree-adjacent variety. It’s a circle of nicely appointed and discreetly mobile homes of different styles and patterns built on either side of a large circular street, each with a good-size yard. The outer ring of houses is bounded by a split-rail fence, and beyond this the town gives over to the high desert, with low, prickly sagebrush and rafts of tumbleweed through which jackrabbits and antelopes poke delicately in the cool mornings. Everyone has plenty of space and a view of the low-lying mountains ringing the basin. The houses look pretty good. It’s a little neighborhood on the frontier. Home on the range, if you will.”
― Lydia Kiesling, The Golden State

“It’s not very comforting,” she says. “If they could do that with some normal person who’s just trying to be with his family imagine all the terrorists they could just let in because no one was paying attention.” Jesus Christ, I think. “Yeah,” I say. “But I think the reason they did that to Engin is because some people think anyone with a possibly Muslim name is a terrorist, and now he can’t be with me and our baby, so that’s not a good policy either.” Nonetheless I allow myself to agree without difficulty with say about the Government, what she has to say about Barack Hussein Obama. I’m sure that’s how she says his name, emphasis on Hussein like that is A Sign of Something and not one of the most common names in the entire goddamn world.”
― Lydia Kiesling, The Golden State