DREAMHOUSE QUOTES
PATRICIA
- It hardly matters now
- Beauty will go for driving and English lessons. She deserves a better job
- The one good man in my life
- Patricia liked to think she fell in love with him because he was everything Richard
was not.
- In my experience, backward glances only crick the neck
- Since Patricia had first known the house, it had never had so much as a crack in it,
but inside it had always been as dark and dank as any cave.
- There’s an overall numbness, a feeling of vacancy, a weight in the arms, that makes
it seem impossible to move
- She knows she wouldn’t want the shame of it
- Too much lies between them
- You certainly seem different. You’re wearing a suit.
- It’s not the suit that strikes her as irregular, but his way of wearing it.
- He used to tease her
- Today everything between them seems to bristle with inuendo and hurt.
- But you were a gentle child, always wanting to please
- When he went it was like all the colur had faded from the world
- It was not so much tha the colour had gne as much as the thing that shone inside
colour itself
- Still smarting from Looksmarts ingratitude
- As the year went by, Patricia learned to shelve the disappearance of Looksmart
along with all those other items she had never properly understood
- And what is of value, after all? There is little difference, it seems to her, between
herself and that tennis racquet.
- The only thing she has to look forward to these days is the house in Durban
- Unimportant? I have no idea – but the past doesn’t amount to much in the end, does
it?
- Yet, as ever, she is powerless to step in, to intervene.
- She never told Richard about the newborn child
- It was a secret pleasure and an act of defiance. Not so much against Richard as in
the opposite direction from him, towards everything Richard was not – towards life.
- Even then she was far more substantial than he – t leas tin any way that might have
mattered
- She liked him or his boldness of vision: little did she suspect that he had used all of it
up
- I will never be able to take back the thoughts I had – that you say I had – when that
poor girl lay bleeding.
- I only married him because I was pregnant
- I gave you everything
- She arrived two months early ad two days dead
- Tiny grey form
- Rachel would be forever dead
- And it would only be later that se was able to cry
- That word she used with Looksmart: hope
, - Perhaps the deaths of Rachel and Grace have levelled the land between them and
established perspectives
- Idnt you know that you are the only child ever to be happy in this house
- You were like the sun, my son
- But after a while I came to think of you as another dead child
- It went against my idea of you
- It may be his dream house.. but it still comes from her. Perhaps too much from her.
- He ahs the same need to diminish the earth he comes from, which is not s much the
farm or even the country as it is his own flesh and blood
- She has spent her whole like watching the things that has mattered the most to her
leaving her.
- She isn’t about to leave her child alone on the hill, and wonders how she ever
thought she could
- As for Looksmart, she finds she likes him for his lies far better than she likes him for
his truths
- He was the only man ever worth listening to (when Richard says that she has only
ever listened to her father)
- Only tonight there is more rage in her than any body should veer be asked t contain
- But she has sometimes wondered whether it was her fathers love that ruined her, for
everything else since has been a bit of a disappointment
- Mrs Bell also knew about their affair
- He chose to withhold himself (talking about John Ford’s letter)
- Nowhere did he ever say he loved her
- A home that is for people who are sick
- He was probably more at home in that suit than she gave him credit for
BEAUTY
- Even now she is frightened of uBaas
- There is always a bit of good in everything, even uBaas
- It has always been a joke amongst the workers: uBaas is the one who can never
keep his zip up.
- Even her fury is descreet
- Each new house was an effort not to forget the original house – or otherwise each
was an attempt to refresh it
- Perhaps the only real justice in the world is the one you make for yourself
- uMesis is speaking as though Beauty hardly exists
- It’s what men do. They treat women different when they are with other men.
- She knows why Looksmart is here
- This is the sound of two people who are feeling too much
- He was always reputed to be boy with too many words inside his head, thinking
himself too clever to listen to the sound of anyone else
- Even those who see each ther every day are finally blind to one another.
- Sometimes a small amount of the truth is enough to satisfy a persons appetite. The
challenge is to know which words to end at.
- This is what uMesis prefers to think, so Beauty lets her think it
- In all her time on the farm, she has never seen Bheki sitting here as if he owns the
place.
PATRICIA
- It hardly matters now
- Beauty will go for driving and English lessons. She deserves a better job
- The one good man in my life
- Patricia liked to think she fell in love with him because he was everything Richard
was not.
- In my experience, backward glances only crick the neck
- Since Patricia had first known the house, it had never had so much as a crack in it,
but inside it had always been as dark and dank as any cave.
- There’s an overall numbness, a feeling of vacancy, a weight in the arms, that makes
it seem impossible to move
- She knows she wouldn’t want the shame of it
- Too much lies between them
- You certainly seem different. You’re wearing a suit.
- It’s not the suit that strikes her as irregular, but his way of wearing it.
- He used to tease her
- Today everything between them seems to bristle with inuendo and hurt.
- But you were a gentle child, always wanting to please
- When he went it was like all the colur had faded from the world
- It was not so much tha the colour had gne as much as the thing that shone inside
colour itself
- Still smarting from Looksmarts ingratitude
- As the year went by, Patricia learned to shelve the disappearance of Looksmart
along with all those other items she had never properly understood
- And what is of value, after all? There is little difference, it seems to her, between
herself and that tennis racquet.
- The only thing she has to look forward to these days is the house in Durban
- Unimportant? I have no idea – but the past doesn’t amount to much in the end, does
it?
- Yet, as ever, she is powerless to step in, to intervene.
- She never told Richard about the newborn child
- It was a secret pleasure and an act of defiance. Not so much against Richard as in
the opposite direction from him, towards everything Richard was not – towards life.
- Even then she was far more substantial than he – t leas tin any way that might have
mattered
- She liked him or his boldness of vision: little did she suspect that he had used all of it
up
- I will never be able to take back the thoughts I had – that you say I had – when that
poor girl lay bleeding.
- I only married him because I was pregnant
- I gave you everything
- She arrived two months early ad two days dead
- Tiny grey form
- Rachel would be forever dead
- And it would only be later that se was able to cry
- That word she used with Looksmart: hope
, - Perhaps the deaths of Rachel and Grace have levelled the land between them and
established perspectives
- Idnt you know that you are the only child ever to be happy in this house
- You were like the sun, my son
- But after a while I came to think of you as another dead child
- It went against my idea of you
- It may be his dream house.. but it still comes from her. Perhaps too much from her.
- He ahs the same need to diminish the earth he comes from, which is not s much the
farm or even the country as it is his own flesh and blood
- She has spent her whole like watching the things that has mattered the most to her
leaving her.
- She isn’t about to leave her child alone on the hill, and wonders how she ever
thought she could
- As for Looksmart, she finds she likes him for his lies far better than she likes him for
his truths
- He was the only man ever worth listening to (when Richard says that she has only
ever listened to her father)
- Only tonight there is more rage in her than any body should veer be asked t contain
- But she has sometimes wondered whether it was her fathers love that ruined her, for
everything else since has been a bit of a disappointment
- Mrs Bell also knew about their affair
- He chose to withhold himself (talking about John Ford’s letter)
- Nowhere did he ever say he loved her
- A home that is for people who are sick
- He was probably more at home in that suit than she gave him credit for
BEAUTY
- Even now she is frightened of uBaas
- There is always a bit of good in everything, even uBaas
- It has always been a joke amongst the workers: uBaas is the one who can never
keep his zip up.
- Even her fury is descreet
- Each new house was an effort not to forget the original house – or otherwise each
was an attempt to refresh it
- Perhaps the only real justice in the world is the one you make for yourself
- uMesis is speaking as though Beauty hardly exists
- It’s what men do. They treat women different when they are with other men.
- She knows why Looksmart is here
- This is the sound of two people who are feeling too much
- He was always reputed to be boy with too many words inside his head, thinking
himself too clever to listen to the sound of anyone else
- Even those who see each ther every day are finally blind to one another.
- Sometimes a small amount of the truth is enough to satisfy a persons appetite. The
challenge is to know which words to end at.
- This is what uMesis prefers to think, so Beauty lets her think it
- In all her time on the farm, she has never seen Bheki sitting here as if he owns the
place.
