Housekeeping

“Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.”

“Need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?” 

"Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery."

I just finished Marilyne Robinson's Housekeeping. It left me feeling sad and wise and aching for the past. One of those books where you don't read for a week after because you want to keep the feelings you had when you were reading this one. To read another would taint it almost, or erase  the piece of your heart that carried this one inside it.

p.s. Thanks for your interest in the Pen Pal Project. I have already written my Pen Pal and have matched up several more partners. If you are interested, feel free to email me still and I'll find someone for you.