“The rooms had never felt particularly warm, and here they looked especially vacant: of any soul, all memories. I remembered how naked I felt when buyers came to tour the house once we put it up for sale; how obvious it was that the life of a typical Brooklyn family was not being lived there — that the three small bedrooms on the top floor hadn’t been filled with children and wouldn’t be — and I felt, for a moment, naked once more. But of course it was nothing the casual reader would ever pick up on, and that’s when I realized that a spell had been lifted: never again would I envy the lives of people whose homes I saw in books or magazines, no matter how perfect they may have appeared. Because mine looked pretty nice in those pages too.”

Explore more quotes:


About the author

This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.