The House at Watch Hill Quotes

“That’s what we women do. From the hour of our birth to the birth of our daughters to the dying of our grandmothers and mothers, we spin pain on our looms into a joyful fabric, for what would be the point of doing less?”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“There are things we grow up believing because we’ve been taught to believe them. Things we think are impossible because we’ve been told they are. Then there are those things we feel in our bones. Despite the lies heard by our ears, our bones know the truth.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“Mom used to say many people waste their lives in a liminal no-man’s-land, stranded on a bridge between their tragic past and their uncertain future. The more they glance back, the more afraid they become to go forward. And there is, she’d told me, but one escape from that bridge. Live now, my darling Zo. That’s all we have anyway. The past is baggage lost at the airport; don’t present your claim check. The uncertain future is nothing but fear about things that will likely never come to pass.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“The person with the strongest will wins in any situation. You just have to want what you want more than anyone else does. Passion is the currency of the universe.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“The darkness we become—if we become it, if we permit ourselves to become it—transpires because we lose faith in ourselves. Easier to believe the worst of ourselves than to face the rigors of the battle necessary to regain lost faith. Do not tread that perilous, emotional path, Ms. Grey. Each of us is flawed. None of us are spared. To obsess over our flaws defies, and undermines, the very purpose of our existence. If you see only bad when you look within, you render yourself incapable of bringing good into the world. Ms.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“To obsess over our flaws defies, and undermines, the very purpose of our existence.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“There was a wooden counter between two tall cabinets; long-handled skillets and kettles hung from pegs on the log and mud walls. I felt as if I’d slipped back in time, and shivered, realizing I was standing in the doorway of the original cabin, the very first house ever built on Watch Hill. The air here was surprisingly fresh, cool, and dry, with none of the musty odor of the chute.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“Women got it; we’d been caretakers since the dawn of time, when Adam, convalescing from his missing rib, conned Eve into climbing a tree to pick him an apple, and the fairer sex has been taking the fall ever since.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“You’re worn down by a constant internal battle you don’t even know you’re fighting. Your magic is desperate to be born, but something is blocking it. Nothing tastes particularly good; nothing angers or excites you. You feel empty, living in a state of incessant, mild malcontent, incapable even of feeling strong discontent. Incapable of feeling strong anything.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“Mr. Balfour said gently, “Ms. Grey, I don’t know you, but I get the feeling your life hasn’t been easy, and you may find it difficult to believe that good things happen to good people. Life isn’t always hard. What do you have to lose? Give it a try. Go see the house. You might find you love it here in Divinity. You and I may not be relatives, but Juniper was family to us, and that means you’re family”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“It wasn’t my place to belittle another’s beliefs on life and death, their faith, their view of the proper order of things as they saw it.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“But, God, the manor was oppressively cavernous at night! In the dark, it was easy to imagine, as Este had said, that the house expanded infinitely. Were I to walk too far, or fail to pay strict attention, I might stray into some witchy no-man’s-land from which return might not be as simple as merely retracing my steps but cost me a debt in blood, or a piece of my soul. Really, there was a turret with no ingress, a door in Juniper’s office that didn’t open, concealed panels in the walls connecting wings; Cameron Manor was far from predictable.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“I think gray is a color that doesn’t know what it wants to be, so rather than assertively being something, it’s timidly nothing. I despise gray. Be a color, get a life.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“It’s funny — though not really at all, if you think about it — how abruptly and completely we manage to rationalize the inexplicable. If the mind fails to seize upon a plausible explanation (which would endure only the gentlest of scrutiny), we dismiss the inexplicable event and refuse to consider it again. Tell ourselves it was an aberration, an oddity, that we are not masters of the universe; there are stranger things in the night than you and I.

There are, by the way.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“Seventy or eighty years ago, being pregnant and unwed was scandalous. But while poor and unwed made a woman an outcast, rich and unwed had probably only gotten her called eccentric, “an independent thinker” ahead of her time.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“I was a woman on a mission. I wanted the kitchen and a bedroom, and I wanted them fast.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“For a few minutes, I was so blissfully united with such raw, conjoined feminine power, it was more intoxicating than any libation, as if we were all filling a cup from a shared cauldron of pain, grief, trial, and tribulation, and alchemizing it into a tonic of strength, joy, hope, and power.
That's what women do. From the hour of our birth to the birth of our daughters to the dying of our grandmothers and mothers, we spin pain on our looms into a joyful fabric, for what would be the point of doing less?”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill

“Women got it; we’d been caretakers since the dawn of time, when Adam, convalescing from his missing rib, conned Eve into climbing a tree to pick him an apple, and the fairer sex has been taking the fall ever since. We knew life was challenging and could be deeply unfair. Compassion went a long way.”
― Karen Marie Moning, The House at Watch Hill