luce (cry baby) > Books: she-is-nasty‎ (20)

“This is what exploration had opened up the door to. Not only widespread slaughter, but the necessary accompaniment of gorging.”

“This is what exploration had opened up the door to. Not only widespread slaughter, but the necessary accompaniment of gorging.”

“I was one of those people who made up for what she lacked in talent with her father’s money.”

“I find it hard to feel bad for Hansel. It’s the witch I feel for.”

“[I]n our culture there was a weird enthusiasm for cannibalism. Cannibalism was a big thrill as long as we weren’t doing it.”

“After a few hurdles, my life would achieve a stunning, appealing normalcy.”

“The needs of appetite justified everything.”

“I seem to have touched a nerve,” said Ann.
“Thank God for that,” I said. “I was beginning to wonder if I was still alive.”

“I thought tests led to something. A diagnosis led to a plan, a cure. But tests, I know now, never lead us anywhere. Tests are dark roads with no destinations, just leading to more dark.”

“I was always busy. Doing what? Grace would ask. Getting divorced. Seeing another surgeon, another wellness charlatan. Gazing into the void of my life.”

“Still sick, so we hear. So sad. We are all terribly sad about it, turly. Truly, truly.”

“But not too much pain, am I right? Not too much, never too much. If it was too much, you wouldn't know what to do with me, would you? Too much would make you uncomfortable. Bored. My crying would leave a bad taste. That would just be bad theatre, wouldn't it? A bad show. You want a good show. They all do. A few pretty tears on my cheeks that you can brush away. Just a delicate little bit of ouch so you know there's someone in there. So you don't get too scared of me, am I right? So you know I'm still a vulnerable thing. That I can be brought down if I need be.”

“When she was just a kid, Gloria told her never to trust a group of happy, smiling multiracia

“When she was just a kid, Gloria told her never to trust a group of happy, smiling multiracial people. Never trust races when they get along, she said. If you see different races of people just standing around, smiling at one another, run for the hills, kid. Take cover. They’ll break your heart.”

“She never got too greedy. She never got sloppy. And most important, she never got caught.”

“It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we ra

“It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”

“There were things that she wanted to ask Clare Kendry. She wished to find out about this hazardous business of “passing,” this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly. What, for example, one did about background, how one accounted for oneself.”

“The social, psychological, and economic motivations for passing, they also perform acts of literary trespass in exposing the cultural and legal fiction of race.”

“[S]he could not conceive that any one could tire of her of whom she had not first tired.”

“It never occurred to her that other people's lives went on when they were out of her range of vision.”

“Her entrances were always triumphs; but they had no sequel.”

“Dearest dearest darling most important dearest darling Natalie—this is me talking, your own priceless own Natalie.”

“Dearest dearest darling most important dearest darling Natalie—this is me talking, your own priceless own Natalie.”

“I was like Joan of Arc, or

“I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life—the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.”

“There is no time in our lives when we are so conspicuously without mercy as in adolescence.”

“There is no time in our lives when we are so conspicuously without mercy as in adolescence.”

“It felt like a passion, it felt like being in love, it was being in love, it was the kind of thing you delude yourself that, if all goes well, will last a lifetime. Things, of course, didn't go well. When do they?”

“It is interesting how such reputations are built. They come about through confusing the two kinds of truth telling: the declaration of opinion and principle and the recounting of history.”

“I found her exciting in a disturbing way, a soul-shacking way, without knowing in the least what I wanted of her.”

“She wished she could stop living, or sleep all the time.”

“Bow all your heads to our adored Mary Katherine.”

“Bow all your heads to our adored Mary Katherine.”

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”

Edit:
I've now read this 6 times and I find myself still in love with it. Jackson is a brilliant storyteller and We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a marvel of a book.