micha’s Reviews > The Dutch House > Status Update

I looked at the girl in portrait. They should have let her always be that girl.

Do houses ever die of grief?
Only the decent ones.

They were living together in their own paradise of memory.

I wondered if she was reading it for a class or if she was just one of those girls who read poetry on trains.

But the thing I couldn't stop thinking about was the portrait of Maeve hanging there in the drawing room without us. How had we had forgotten her?
Maeve at ten in a red coat, her eyes bright and direct, her black hair loose.
Even as my sister was right in front of me I felt like I had somehow left her behind, back in the house alone where she wouldn't be safe.

It sounded so nostalgic when he said it, the three of us, as if we had once been a unit instead of just a circumstance.

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

"Why don't you say goodbye to me before you leave?"
"I could never do that. Never in a million years could I say goodbye to you."