How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The children could look back and see their own car, green and lonely, in the middle of the parking lot.
It was kind of like a home, the car, Dicey thought. She understood why Sammy wanted to stay there. (1.2.53-54)
Car sweet car… It makes sense that Dicey would see the car as a kind of home. After all, it was the last place they were with Momma.
Quote #2
"Yeah, but our house was out in the dunes. We had the ocean. Our house was nicer than the ones other people wanted."
"The bathtub was in the kitchen," James reminded her. "It was small, even smaller than these houses."
"So what?"
"Nobody else would have lived in it. Only us. Some of the kids said their parents thought it should be torn down."
"What do I care what people say?" Dicey asked.
"They called it a shack," James went on.
"I liked it," Dicey said. "The ocean's better than fancy bathrooms, any day." (1.2.88-94)
Home is what you make of it. It doesn't matter that the house they lived in with Momma was run down, Dicey loves it and thinks it was a happy place. Plus, it had the ocean.
Quote #3
Dicey looked at the gravestones about her. She read an inscription: Home is the hunter, home from the hill, and the sailor home from the sea.
What a thing to put on a grave.
As if to say that being dead was home. Home, for Dicey, was their house in Provincetown, where the wind made the boards creak in a way that was almost music. Or Aunt Cilla's big white house that faced over the water, the one she had dreamed about. Being dead wasn't going home, was it? Unless—and she remembered what James had been saying last night—home was the place where you finally stayed, forever and ever. Then this person was home, and nobody would be truly home until he, or she, died. It was an awful thought […].
If you took home to mean where you rested content and never wanted to go anywhere else, then Dicey had never had a home. The ocean always made her restless; so even Provincetown, even their own remembered kitchen, wasn't home. That was why Dicey always ran along the sand beside the ocean, as if she had to race the waves. The ocean wasn't home, then, and neither was anyplace else. Nobody could be home, really, until he was in his grave. Nobody could rest, really, until then. It was a cold, hard thought written on that cold, hard stone. But maybe true.
If Dicey died, she guessed she wouldn't mind having this poem on her tombstone, now that she thought about it. She was the hunter and the sailor, and she guessed dead people did lie quietly in their graves. (1.7.7-9, 12-13)
That is quite a thing to put on a grave. The quote is from the Robert Louis Stevenson poem, "Requiem." It's all about a person resting peacefully in death. Maybe Dicey is right—the grave is the only home.