The Dutch House: A Read with Jenna Pick

“You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself.

“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.”

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.

The doctors said the diabetes could have been brought on by trauma, or it could have been a virus. The body had all sorts of means to deal with what it couldn’t understand.

“Men leave their children all the time and the world celebrates them for it. The Buddha left and Odysseus left and no one gave a shit about their sons. They set out on their noble journeys to do whatever the hell they wanted to do and thousands of years later we’re still singing about it.

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.

There was such a plainness about her, as if she’d already shrugged off all human concerns.

My mother used to say the silkiest sound on earth was a rich woman’s laugh.

she left that I realized she’d stayed those Sunday nights because Sunday was when she washed the sheets and did the rest of the laundry,