Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House Quotes

“Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn't the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that's actually the easy part. The hard part is what's right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life.”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

“Also, I was coming up on my five year anniversary of owning the house, and if there's anything I've learned in five years, it's this: if a piece of your house falls off and you don't know what to do with it, throwing it in the trash and forgetting about it is a perfectly viable option.”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

“But it’s the temptation of so many suburban-raised children to invent tales of adversity, to create hardscrabble mythologies out of life histories marked by little more than field hockey games and orthodontist appointments.”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir

“...moving, like chocolate and sunshine, stirs up many of the same chemicals you ostensibly produce when you're in love.”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

“For so long, maybe all my life, I thought only a house could make you whole. I thought I was nothing without an interesting address. I thought I was only as good as my color scheme, my drawer pulls, my floors....it's the knowledge that a house can be as fragile as life itself. You'd think it would be stronger, since it can stand in one spot for centuries while generations of humans run through its rooms, grow up, move out, and eventually die. But a house is an inherently limited entity. It can't do everything, or even most things. It cannot give you a personality. It cannot bring you love. It cannot cure loneliness. It can provide comfort, safety, a sense of pride--that much I know.”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

“I craved . . . an ineffable state of being I can only describe as domestic integrity. This integrity has something to do with being able to not feel like an imposter in your home and, therefore, in your life.”
― Meghan Daum , Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

“Having decided there was little point in denying my status as a gentrifier, I joined the neighborhood security association, a network of mostly middle- and upper-middle-class homeowners that employed a small stable of private patrol officers to cruise the neighborhood and scare any potential marauders, most of which amounted to kids loitering near the park.”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir

“the time I watched a knife fight outside the window of the studio in Greenwich Village, the time I got an HIV test at a Department of Health free clinic in order to prove some kind of point to myself (other than that I didn’t have HIV, which I already knew).”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir

“these are the regions where populations of artists and radicals in the 1930s and 1940s morphed into heavily Latino populations in the 1950s and 1960s.”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir

“(I’d get it wrong anyway; everyone who hasn’t lived there thirty years or more gets accused of getting it wrong),”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir

“But in the outside world, in places (on the rare occasions I visited them) where the vast blankness of the land and sky made even the enormous supermarkets seem tiny, where, to many, words like “Vassar” were just a random sequence of letters, where weather mattered more than most anything else, I often felt lost, irrelevant, fatuous. I”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir

“wrestling with a curiosity about country living that seemed strangely akin to a homophobic person “struggling with same-sex attraction.” As much as I wanted to be a creature of the city, as much as I’d organized my entire life around the overpriced, undersized vagaries of Manhattan living, I sometimes found myself wanting desperately to live on a farm, or at least near one.”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir

“It’s odd, then, that in my twenties, despite my devotion to urbanity, I often found myself wrestling with a curiosity about country living that seemed strangely akin to a homophobic person “struggling with same-sex attraction.” As much as I wanted to be a creature of the city, as much as I’d organized my entire life around the overpriced, undersized vagaries of Manhattan living, I sometimes found myself wanting desperately to live on a farm, or at least near one. I can’t explain this by way of any rational desire;”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House: A Memoir

“I wonder if the real measure of "home" is the degree to which you can leave it alone. Maybe appreciating a house means knowing when to stop decorating. Maybe you've never really lived there until you've thrown its broken pieces in the garbage. Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn't the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that's actually the easy part. The hard part is what's right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life. The hard part is learning not just how to be but mastering the nearly impossible art of how to be at home.”
― Meghan Daum, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House