Chapter 32

• “she’s cutting more, with a pairing knife, her large hands deft, indifferent. The rest of her body does not move, nor does her face. It’s as if she’s doing it in her sleep.”
• “Rita rolls her eyes to the sky as if consulting silently with some deity there.”
• “I am surprised: she doesn't usually offer me anything. Maybe she feels that I’ve risen in status enough to be given a match”
• “I could burn the house down. Such a fine thought, it makes me shiver. An escape, quick and narrow.”
• "I like to do things right, is all," she says, grumpy again. "No sense otherwise."
• filling me in a long rich dirty cinnamon sigh
• I don't need to smoke this cigarette.
• “Sometimes after a few drinks he becomes silly, and cheats at Scrabble. He encourages me to do it too, and we take extra letters and make words with them that don’t exist.”
• His head a little below mine, so that when he looks up at me it's at a juvenile angle. It must amuse him, this fake subservience.
• “It’s difficult for me to believe I have power over him, of any sort, but I do; although it’s of an equivocal kind.”
• “He wants, all right. Especially after a few drinks.”
• “I hold myself very still. I try to empty my mind. I think about the sky, at night, when there’s no moon. I have no opinion, I say.”
• This lack of fear is dangerous
• The main problem was with the men. there was nothing for them any more. [...] I mean there was nothing for them to do with women [...] the sex was too easy. Anyone could just buy it. There was nothing to work for, nothing to fight for.
• “Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.”
• “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better.”
• “That’s where she was swinging, just lightly, like a pendulum, the way you could swing as a child [...] She was safe then, protected altogether"
• “Sometimes I think she’s still in here, with me. I feel buried.”