Chapter 23

• “This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction.”
• “If I ever get out of here – Let’s stop there. I intend to get out of here”
• “But if you happen to be a man, some time in the future, and you’ve made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman.”
• “if I’m able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, yet another remove.”
• “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.
• “Cora smiles at me, a smile that includes. These are the moments that must make what she is doing seem worthwhile”
• “It’s up to me to repay the team”
• “Here hope is the simplest kind. She wants a Birth Day, here, with guests and food and presents [...] I am to provide these joys for her. I would rather have the disapproval.”
• “there must be something he wants, from me. To want is to have a weakness”
• “and a fireplace without a fire in it”
• “It’s an oasis of forbidden.”
• We are two-legged wombs, that's all. sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.
• “The smile is not sinister or predatory.”
• “So that’s what’s in the forbidden room! Scrabble! I want to laugh”
• “Now it’s forbidden, for us. Now it’s dangerous. Now it’s indecent.”
• “We play two games. Larynx, I spell. Valance. Quince. Zygote.”
• “I think about the blood coming out of him, hot as soup, sexual, over my hands.

  In fact I don’t think about anything of the kind. I put it in only afterwards.”
• “She who does not hesitate is lost”