The High House Quotes

“Somehow, while we had all been busy, while we had been doing those small things that added up to living, the future had slipped into the present - and despite the fact that we had known that it would come, the overwhelming feeling, now that it was here, was of surprise, like waking up one morning to find that you had been young, and now all at once you weren't.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“... I heard her say,
- They think this baby is an admission of defeat,
and then,
- They think it means that I no longer care. Or that I don't believe in what I say -
but watching her I thought that it was not defeat at all. Rather, it was a kind of furious defiance that had let her to have a child, despite all she believed about the future - a kind of pact with the world that, having increased her stake in it, she should try to protect what she had found to love.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“Precarity and continuity... We all end up dead, but the land we leave goes on, we hope.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“There is a kind of organic mercy, grown deep inside us, which makes it so much easier to care about small, close things, else how could we live? As I grew up, crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability and we tuned it out like static, we adjusted to each emergent normality and we did what we had always done - the commutes and holidays, the Friday big shops, day trips to the countryside, afternoons in the park.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“...to be needed is to be held in place.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“Dios , te lo imploro: mira en el interior de mi corazón. No dejes que mi muerte sea en vano en mi próxima vida; usa mi cuerpo de modo que sirva para que todos alcancen la felicidad plena.”
― Miyazawa Kenji, Night on the Galactic Railroad

“—What they don’t seem to understand, she said, —is that anxiety is a perfectly reasonable response to what we are living through.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“I thought that it was not defeat at all. Rather, it was a kind of furious defiance that had led her to have a child, despite all she believed about the future. A kind of pact with the world, that, having increased her stake in it, she should try to protect what she had found to love.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“I only knew that when they came back, they brought fear with them. Tracked in like mud across the carpet.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“People said, ‘They must have known their homes were vulnerable.’ We were protected by our houses, and our educations, and our high street shopping centers. We had the habits of luck and power, and couldn’t understand that they were not our right. We saw that the situation was bad elsewhere, but surely things would work out. Because didn’t they always, for us?”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“Somehow, while we had all been busy, while we had been doing those small things that added up to living, the future had slipped into the present—and despite the fact that we had known that it would come, the overwhelming feeling now that it was here, was of surprise, like waking up one morning to find that you had been young, and now all at once you weren’t.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“The rain went on, and I began to think that this was what we had been preparing for - and how I congratulated myself, each time I unblocked a gutter or a drain, on our resilience. I put on my wellingtons and Grandy's old sou'wester and went out to check the garden, to pick the last of the autumn raspberries, to pull the leaves of the perpetual spinach. I let the chickens out to scratch in the wet earth and then called them back into the scullery, and I thought how fine it was to be so well prepared. I didn't think about the supermarket vans, which still came monthly. I didn't think about the things we used but couldn't make: the sugar, the milk, the bottles of olive oil. I didn't think about the doctors and the hospitals that would be there if we wanted them. I didn't think about all the mechanical things, the fridge and the generator, the lights with their bulbs, the taps that turned. I didn't think about that vest net which, invisible, imperceptible, held us up.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“It was easy to believe, all through those long gray weeks of rain, that we were already the only ones left in the universe, but in truth I think I could still feel them - the others; the cities and the towns of people who went about their business as usual, finding their small familiar joys and telling one another that, after all, it was the best they could do. The rain fell on all of us. It drenched us the same, and in the weeks and months after the flood, that is what was lost: that sense of being a small part of a whole that persisted, even when we might dislike everything about it.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“We are not self-sufficient. There is no such thing. We rely on the stores we have left in the bard. We rely on the chickens, but the flock is shrinking. We rely on the wheat, but one bad year and we will have none left to sow as seed. We rely on the tide pool and the generator, which, should it break, we cannot fix. We rely on the high house, on its fabric, on its shelter and protection, but these things will not last forever. We rely on one another. I try not to be afraid, but I am.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House

“I remember the birds, and how it seemed to me that we hovered on the edge of understanding, and that they were only waiting for me to be still enough before they would come close to me, and speak.”
― Jessie Greengrass, The High House