Chapter 17

• “We are containers. It is only the insides of our bodies that are important.”
• “The outside can become hard and wrinkled, for all they care, like the shell of a nut. This was the decree of the Wives, this absence of hand lotion. They don’t want us to look attractive. For them, things are bad enough as it is.”
• “As long as we do this, butter our skin to keep it soft, we can believe that we will some day get out, that we will be touched again, in love or desire.”
• “Buttered, I lie on my single bed, flat, like a piece of toast”
• “my white curtains are like gauze bandages”
• “glimmering in the aura cast by the searchlight that illuminates this house at night, or is there a moon?”
• “in the obscured sky a moon does float (…) the moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.”
• “I want Luke here so badly (…) I want to be held (…) I want to be valued (…) I want to steal something.”
• “hair down my back like a mane, my eyes gleaming. I like this. I am doing something, on my own. The active, is it a tense? Tensed.”
• “he can’t give me away. Nor I him; for the moment we’re mirrors”
• “I want to reach up, taste his skin, he makes me hungry”
• “It’s so good, to be touched by someone, to be felt so greedily, to feel so greedy”
• “Luke, you’d know, you’d understand. It’s you here, in another body. Bullshit.”
• “I’m a coward. I hate the thought of pain.”
• A withered daffodils [...] the daffodils will soon be thrown out, they're beginning to smell.
• As long as we do this, butter our skin to keep it soft, we can believe that we will some day get out, that we will be touched again, in love or desire. We have ceremonies of our own, private ones.