the last housewife

• ➊ “You were victims. I didn’t know about that word. What did you call yourself when you’d taken an active role in your own suffering? When your hands weren’t clean, when there wasn’t a single part of you that was, especially not your mind, all those deep, dark corners?”

deerskin

• ➊ “I was no child, for you and my mother gave me no childhood; and my maidenhood you tore from me, that I might never become a woman; and a woman I have not become, for I have been too afraid. But I return to you now all that you did give me: all the rage and the terror, the pain and the hatred that should have been love. The nightmares, and the waking dreams that are worse than nightmares because they are memories. These I return to you, for I want them no more, and I will bear them not one whit of my time on this earth more.”
• ➋ “Her world as she understood it had ended with her mother’s death; and what she had learned by that death was that she was alone, and had always been alone, and had grown accustomed to it without knowing what she was accustoming herself to. With the knowledge of her aloneness came the rush of self-declaration: I will not be nothing.”
• ➌ “No, Lissar thought. It is not empty; but I can close it for now, and put it away. I will draw it down later, and open it again; but the Lady has given me time and healing, time for healing. I will be strong again when I open that box; strong enough to open it. My strength now is to set it aside.”
• ➍ “I’m frightened of facing human beings again, she thought. I don’t know where I am; I do not know even if I speak the language of this place… I am frightened of the things I cannot explain. I long for another human face just as I fear it.”
• ❺ “There was nothing in her gaze but herself; no shadows, nor shards of broken stories; nothing she wanted to make Lissar a part of; the smile that went with the look was similarly kind and plan and open.”

the dark interval

• ➊ “You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not, dear. You have to move. You have to return. You must continue his life inside of yours insofar as it was unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours. You, who quite truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on his path.”
• ➋ “All you needed was to speak with someone for a bit, dear child, to claim an inner property which had been entirely prepared in silence all along. What could I contribute to this, what would I ever be able to add to this? I could only show you what you had already obtained inside yourself.”
• ➌ “Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation.”

little eve

• ➊ “But the boy knew that his heart would bear the mark of it, always. He would never be free of that act. It would be a milestone on a blasted road, down which he would travel further, further … Right and wrong - they are just words. When we are standing in the dark, holding a flaming poker, there is only one thing to consider and that is ourselves. Can we hold such an act within us, without being irrevocably changed?”
• ➋ “She does this whenever she goes forth from the cottage. She leaves herself behind so they cannot hurt her.”

almond

• ➊ “Being ordinary is the hardest thing to achieve. Everyone thinks being ordinary is easy and all, but how many of them would actually fit into the so-called smooth road the word implied?”
• ➋“Doctors like to put labels on patients. It helps them treat abnormal symptoms, or even abnormal people. But the human brain is rather a strange thing. And I still truly believe that the heart can prevail over the brain. What I’m trying to say is that you might have just grown in a way that’s a little different from how other people grow.”

averno

• ➊ “Tell me this is the future, I won’t believe you. Tell me I’m living, I won’t believe you.”
• ➋ “Death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life.”
• ➌ “The ideal burns in you like a fever. Or not like a fever, like a second heart.”
• ➍ “How privileged you are, to be still passionately clinging to what you love; the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you. Surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something.”
• ❺ “In the dark, my soul said I am your soul. No one can see me; only you — only you can see me. And it said, you must trust me.”
• ❻ “It is not finally interesting to remember. The damage is not interesting. No one who knew me then is still alive.”