Ann Patchett

Patchett, the New York Times-bestselling author of Commonwealth and State of Wonder, returns with a moving story exploring the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go.

A Novel

The Dutch House

clara

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. It was an almost unbearably vivid present I found myself in

daphne

Apurva  Kaul 

ella

“Do you think it's possible to ever see the past as it actually was?” 

“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.”

“I always imagined the house would die without us. I don't know, I thought it would crumple up. Do houses ever die of grief?"

"Do you think it's possible to ever see the past as it actually was?"

(…) "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."

as if the pull to the past was an inherited condition.

We stood there in the grass, watching the young people fluttering in and out of the windows - moths to the light.

His grief was a river as deep and as wide as my own.

The Dutch House quotes

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