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Quote by Marc Arginteanu

“She wondered how her girlhood home had fared. Did the walls (a combination of mud and plywood) still smell like life? Did vivid leaves still shimmer through the windows (little more than pane-less holes) like hope? Did rain still tap-dance on the roof (a rusty sheet of corrugated metal) like joy?”

Quote by Marc Arginteanu

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Marc Arginteanu

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“The rest of life was just waiting, waiting to go back to the Pudding. It was as if the lights were always on at the Pudding and off everywhere else. But those lights were soft, and the gentle, impressionistic shadows they shed on the dining room were always in the most delicate palette of peach, rose, and pinkish cream.”

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“The two-story dwellings of this city are, beyond all question, the best, as a system, not only owing to the single family ideas they represent, but because their cost is within the reach of all who desire to own their own homes. They have done more to elevate and to make a better home life than any other known influence. They typify a higher civilization, as well as a truer idea of American home life, and are better, purer, sweeter than any tenement house systems that ever existed. They are what make Philadelphia a city of homes, and command the attention of visitors from every quarter of the globe”

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“To love a country as if you’ve lost one: as if it were you on a plane departing from America forever, clouds closing like curtains on your country, the last scene in which you’re a madman scribbling the names of your favorite flowers, trees, and birds you’d never see again, your address and phone number you’d never use again, the color of your father’s eyes, your mother’s hair, terrified you could forget these. To love a country as if I was my mother last spring hobbling, insisting I help her climb all the way up to the U.S. Capitol, as if she were here before you today instead of me, explaining her tears, cheeks pink as the cherry blossoms coloring the air that day when she stopped, turned to me, and said: You know, mijo, it isn’t where you’re born that matters, it’s where you choose to die—that’s your country.”

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“How could you, America? With no answer for all I knew of country was my hurt and rage. But home was home: I dusted off the secrets, cleaned up the lies, nailed the creaky floors down, set a fire, and sat with history books I’d never opened, listened to songs I’d never played, pulled out the old map from a dark drawer, redrew it with more colors, less lines. I stoked the fire, burning on until finally: Okay, nothing’s perfect, I understood, I forgive you, I said—and forgiveness became my country.”

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“She paused, taking in the display of scarlet pelargoniums, the topiary lion painstakingly created by Hoskins, the head gardener, and the tall monkey-puzzle tree that her father had planted on the occasion of her birth twenty-five years before. She noticed bees flitting from bloom to bloom, filling the air with the sound of their low hum, and over that the bright squawks of a pair of choughs. In the distance, the kitchen garden beckoned, sunlight reflecting off the panes of the glasshouse, where pineapples and tomatoes grew in the forced tropical heat.”

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