Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies.
Is extreme goodness always weak? Can a person be good only in the absence of power? The Tempest asks us these questions. There is of course another kind of strength, which is the strength of goodness to resist evil; a strength that Shakespeare’s audience would have understood well. But that kind of strength is not much on display in The Tempest. Gonzalo is simply not tempted. He doesn’t have to say no to a sinfully rich dessert, because he’s never offered one.
I wanted happy endings in those days, and happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked and going to sleep during the rampages.
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.
Is the clue to be found in the nerves, or in the brain itself? To produce insanity, what must first be damaged, and how?
It was true she had never specifically forbidden us to do anything – that would be too crude a violation of her law of nuance – but this only makes me feel I am actually forbidden to do everything.
Which of us is it worse for, her or me?
It’s a juvenile display, the whole act, and pathetic; but it’s something I understand.
Into the plastic basket went my selections, and off I set, step by step, sideways down the stairs, like Little Red Riding Hood on her way to Granny’s house via the underworld. Except that I myself am Granny, and I contain my own bad wolf. Gnawing away, gnawing away.
Why couldn’t they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-suffering as I had been? That was the line they took, the singers, the yarn-spinners. Don’t follow my example, I want to scream in your ears – yes, yours!
I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head. Sometimes it can hardly be borne. What is to be done, what is to be done, I thought. There is nothing to be done.
A Log Cabin quilt is a thing every young woman should have before marriage, as it means the home; and there is always a red square at the centre, which means the hearth fire.
I’m developing a knack for this, I can sniff out hidden misery in others now with hardly any effort at all.
I buy licorice whips, jelly beans, many-layered blackballs with the seed in the middle, packages of fizzy sherbet you suck up through a straw. I dole them out equally, these offerings, these atonements, into the waiting hands of my friends. In the moment just before giving, I am loved.
Blood is thinner than money.
Chewing with my mind full. Stuff comes out my mouth.” And.
It’s like a fart in church.
I had no direction in life, and I felt numb inside, like an orphan.
If it’s only a story, it becomes less frightening. The.
Jane resented him for it, but she didn’t blame him. Her mother inspired in almost everyone who encountered her a vicious desire for escape.