The Dutch House Quotes

“I see the past as it actually was," Maeve said. She was looking at the trees.

"But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you'd been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you're suspended knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“And so I made the decision to change. It might seem like change was impossible, given my nature and my age, but I understood exactly what there was to lose. It was chemistry all over again. The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“That night in my sister’s bed I stared at the ceiling and felt the true loss of our father. Not his money or his house, but the man I sat next to in the car. He had protected me from the world so completely that I had no idea what the world was capable of. I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Disappointment comes from expectation,”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“There would never been an end to all the things I wished I'd asked my father. After so many years I thought less about his unwillingness to disclose and more about how stupid I'd been not to try harder.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“We were all so young, you know. We were still our best selves.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Our childhood was a fire. There had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we has lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost has been taken from us by the person who still lived inside…”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“We had stepped into the river that takes you forward.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“The dinner was a huge production, with kids stashed in the den to eat off card tables like a collection of understudies who dreamed of one day breaking into the dining room.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Maeve, speak up. Don't expect that anyone will do you the favor of listening if you don't trouble yourself to use your voice.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it. I was sickened to realize we’d kept it going for so long, not that we had decided to stop.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“I had a mother who left when I was a child. I didn’t miss her. Maeve was there, with her red coat and her black hair, standing at the bottom of the stairs, the white marble floor with the little black squares, the snow coming down in glittering sheets in the windows behind her, the windows as wide as a movie screen, the ship in the waves of the grandfather clock rocking the minutes away.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“There would never been an end to all the things I wished I'd asked my father.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“The biggest lie in business is that it takes money to make money, remember that. You gotta be smart, have a plan, pay attention to what's going on around you. None of that costs a dime.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Celeste and I had made a few halfhearted attempts to get the kids to church when they were young, and then we gave up and left them in bed. In the city of constant stimulation, we had failed to give them the opportunity to develop strong inner lives for those occasions when they would find themselves sitting through the second act of The Nutcracker.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“It’s like you don’t want to be dislodged from your suffering.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you'd been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to lean on is not yet in place, and for a moment you are suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Because I was fifteen and generally an idiot, I thought that the feeling of home I was experiencing had to do with the car and where it was parked, instead of attributing it wholly and gratefully to my sister.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“The fact that I had never wanted to be a doctor was nothing more than a footnote to a story that interested no one. You wouldn’t think a person could succeed in something as difficult as medicine without wanting to do it, but it turned out I was part of a long and noble tradition of self-subjugation.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“To grow up with a mother who had run off to India, never to be heard from again, that was one thing — there was closure in that, its own kind of death. But to find out she was fifteen stops away on the Number One train to Canal and had failed to be in touch was barbaric. Whatever romantic notions I might have harbored, whatever excuses or allowances my heart had ever made on her behalf, blew out like a match.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“You don't have to like your work to be good at it.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“She was a magnificent child, and the whole world was laid out in front of her, covered in stars.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House