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Helen Stone / Ruth and Lucille’s Mother
Ruth and Lucille’s grandmother, and Helen and Sylvie’s mother. A kind and elderly woman who finds joy in small moments and simple things despite the hardships and losses she’s suffered in life. Despite her age and frailty, she throws herself into taking good care of Ruth and Lucille, and Ruth senses that she seems to want to correct the mistakes of her past through the girls. Sylvia dies of old age five years after Helen’s suicide, leaving Ruth and Lucille once again in a precarious, guardian-less position.
Sylvia Foster Quotes in Housekeeping
The Housekeeping quotes below are all either spoken by Sylvia Foster or refer to Sylvia Foster. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
Now and then Molly searched Sylvie’s room for unreturned library books. Occasionally Helen made a batch of cookies. It was Sylvie who brought in bouquets of flowers. This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father. That event had troubled the very medium of their lives. Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean. The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself, and if the calm that followed it was not greater than the calm that came before it, it had seemed so. And the dear ordinary had healed as seamlessly as an image on water.
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Lucille and me she tended with scrupulous care and little confidence, as if her offerings of dimes and chocolate-chip cookies might keep us, our spirits, here in her kitchen, though she knew they might not.
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Sylvia Foster Quotes in Housekeeping
The Housekeeping quotes below are all either spoken by Sylvia Foster or refer to Sylvia Foster. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 1
Quotes
Now and then Molly searched Sylvie’s room for unreturned library books. Occasionally Helen made a batch of cookies. It was Sylvie who brought in bouquets of flowers. This perfect quiet had settled into their house after the death of their father. That event had troubled the very medium of their lives. Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean. The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself, and if the calm that followed it was not greater than the calm that came before it, it had seemed so. And the dear ordinary had healed as seamlessly as an image on water.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Lucille and me she tended with scrupulous care and little confidence, as if her offerings of dimes and chocolate-chip cookies might keep us, our spirits, here in her kitchen, though she knew they might not.
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