• Pág. 44

You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else. Even when there is no one. A story is like a letter. Dear You, I'll say. Just you, without a name.

• Pág. 59

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of the print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

• Pág. 65

I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.

• Pág. 70

Time as white sound.

• Pág. 74

Why don't women have to prove to one another that they are women?

• Pág. 93

Nor does rape cover it: nothing going on here that I haven't signed up for. There wasn't a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose.

• Pág. 100

But this is wrong, nobodie dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

• Pág. 108

Maybe a vulture would die of eating you.

• Pág. 110

We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives.

• Pág. 114

She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. She said: Because they won't want things they can't have.

• Pág. 131

When I get out of here, if I'm ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove.

• Pág. 139

But that's where I am, there's no escaping it. Time's a trap, I'm caught in it.

Live in the present, make the most of it, it's all you've got.

• Pág. 150

Though I remembered now. What was in them was promise. They dealt in transformations, they suggested an endless series of possibilities, extending like the reflections in two mirrors set facing one another, stretching on, replica after replica, to the vanishing point.

• Pág. 168

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the President and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.

• Pág. 182

Pen Is Envy

• Pág. 214

"But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence."

• Pág. 219

You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

• Pág. 231

"So now that we don't have different clothes," I say, "you merely have different women." This is irony, but he doesn't acknowledge it. "It solves a lot of problems," he says, without a twitch.

• Pág. 241

Underground Femaleroad.

• Pág. 257

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

• Pág. 294

you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a previleged few, in return for those you remove.