The Dutch House: A Read with Jenna Pick

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.

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

Even in their separate frames they were so together, so married, I always thought it must have been one large painting that someone cut in half.

“The biggest lie in business is that it takes money to make money. Remember that. You’ve got to be smart, have a plan, pay attention to what’s going on around you. None of that costs a dime.”

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.

“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.

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,