Chapter Ten

• Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
• I feel so lonely, I could die.
• Sometimes I sing to myself, in my head [...] I don't sing like this often. It makes my throat hurt.
• “remembering her own former and now amputated glory: Hallelujah”
• “no wonder those things used to happen [...] Such things do not happen to nice women.”
• “Oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit”
• “I’m doing my best, she said. I’m trying to give you the best chance you can have. [...] Don't think it's easy for me either, said Aunt Lydia.
• “Got any cigs, she said.”
• “Bras that push your tits up.”
• “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”
• “We were the people not in the papers. We lived in blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
• “I can spend minutes, tens of minutes, running my eyes over the print: FAITH. It’s the only thing they’ve given me to read. If I were caught doing it, would it count? I didn’t put the cushion here myself.”
• “The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others”
• “I ought to feel hatred for this man. I know I ought to feel it, but it isn’t what I do feel. What I feel is more complicated than that. I don’t know what to call it. It isn’t love.”
• Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
• Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.