themes Flashcards
women
• ‘the spectacles women used to make of themselves. Oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit, and bare backs and shoulders, on the street, in public, and legs, not even stockings on them, no wonder these things used to happen.
• ‘There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law.
• ‘but whose fault was it? […] her fault, her fault, her fault’
• ‘He doesn’t mind this, i thought. He doesn’t mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other’s anymore. Instead, i am his.’
• ‘There’s hardly any point in my thinking, is there? I say. Wha i think doesn’t matter. Which is the only reason he can tell me things’
• ‘We’ve given them more than we’ve taken away […] think of the trouble they had before.
Don’t you remember the singles’ bars, the indignity of high school blind dates? The meat market. Don’t you remember the terrible gap between the ones who could get a man easily and the ones who couldn’t? Some of them were desperate, they starved themselves thin or pumped their beasts full of silicone, had their noses cut off. Think of the human misery’
• ‘There is more than one way to control a woman’s body’
‘Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do i want’
‘Bestir yourself. Move your flesh around breathe audibly’
gender
• ‘the commander, too is doing his duty’
• ‘for our purposes your feet and your hands are not essential’
‘We are bit each other anymore. Instead, i am his’
• ‘Better never means better for everyone. it always means worse, for some
• ‘Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn’t about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get apathy with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open!
• ‘No such thing as a sterile man anymore, not officially […] only women who are fruitful and women who are barren’
• ‘It must be hell, to be a man, like that. It must be just fine. It must be hell. It must be very
oppression
• ‘there is more than one kind of freedom, said aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from!
• ‘A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze
• ‘But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see’
• ‘The world can’t be fixed, people can’t be fixed. Not without ending freedom’
• ‘Freedom, like everything else, is relative’
• ‘Are they happy? How can they be happy? […]westernised they used to call it’
• ‘She doesn’t make speeches anymore. She has become speechless’
• “Women can’t add [ …] for them, one and one and one and one dont make four’
rebellion
• ‘But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest!
• ‘At the time I felt that I couldn’t give up. Later I would question this feeling, as Father had taught me to question things.
‘I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance!
‘Walking through darkness, I carry the light.
• ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Be wise and survive!
• ‘All flesh is weak. All flesh is grass, i corrected her in my head’
• ‘She’d been set loose, shed set herself loose. She was now a loose woman’
• ‘My own time [..] as long as i am quiet. As long as i dont move. As long as i lie still’
love
• ‘stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love’
• ‘She disapproved of Luke [… [i said i was in love. She said that was no excuse’
• ‘I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But its the same kind of hunger’
‘Love is not the point’
• ‘We believed in love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh’
• ‘Love, its been so long’ I’m alive in my skin, again’
• ‘I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone’
power of language
• ‘We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank shite spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories’
• ‘There is something powerful about the whispered word.
• ‘I dont want to be telling this story. I dont have to tell it. I dont have anything to tell’
• ‘I tell therefore you are’
memory
‘whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.
• ‘This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction.’
• ‘I’m only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel technicolour’
• ‘I’m a refugee from the past […] i go over the customs and habits of being I’ve left or been forced to leave behind me’
