Alias Grace Margaret Atwood Quotes

If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.

Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.

For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.

There is no fool like an educated fool...

He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that others have done to you.

The small details of life often hide a great significance.

I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.

Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night's sleep. But it isn't so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed.

A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.

If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.

To go from a familiar thing, however undesirable, into the unknown, is always a matter for apprehension, and I suppose that is why so many people are afraid to die.

When I was younger I used to think that if I could hug myself tight enough I could make myself smaller, because there was never enough room for me, at home or anywhere, but if I was smaller then I would fit in.

...the difference between stupid and ignorant was that ignorant could learn.

I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more.

Mary: Some call this "Eve's curse," but I think that is stupid because the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam.

People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.

I would never blame a human creature for feeling lonely.

I don't know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.

The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn't have it both ways, he'd pointed out: if women are seduced and abandoned they're supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then they were mad to begin with.

He doesn’t understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you’ve done, but from the things that others have done to you.

They are hypocrites, they think the Church is a cage to keep God in, so he will stay locked up there and not go wandering about the earth during the week, poking his nose into their business, and looking in the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts, and their lack of true charity; and they believed they need only be bothered about him on Sundays when they have their best clothes on and their faces straight, and their hands washed and their gloves on, and their stories all prepared.

While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me - drawing on my skin - not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings.

It is always a mistake to curse back openly at those who are stronger than you unless there is a fence between.

If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided by one.

While he writes, I feel as if he is drawing me; or not drawing me, drawing on me--drawing on my skin--not with the pencil he is using, but with an old-fashioned goose pen, and not with the quill end but with the feather end. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings. But underneath that is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful. It's like being wakened suddenly in the middle of the night, by a hand over your face, and you sit up with your heart going fast, and no one is there. And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but ripe and splitting open of its own accord. And inside the peach there's a stone.

It is shocking how many crimes the Bible contains. The Governor's wife should cut them all out and paste them into her scrapbook.

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile.

and the evening was so beautiful, that it made a pain in my heart, as when you cannot tell wether you are happy or sad; and I thought that if I could have a wish, it would be that nothing would ever change, and we would stay that way forever.

As it says in the Bible, For now we through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. If it is face to face, there must be two looking.

...I was shut up inside that doll of myself and my true voice could not get out.

Those who have been in trouble themselves are alert to it in others

What is believed in society is not always the equivalent of what is true; but as regards to a woman's reputation, it amounts to the same thing.

This puts him in an instructive mood, and I can see he is going to teach me something, which gentlemen are fond of doing.

And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she'd been reading.

His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile. Thus

There is a Do this or Do that with God, but not any Because.

Romantic people are not supposed to laugh, I know that much from looking at the pictures.

Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can't stop it from breaking in the same way it always does, and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it's the day itself. A Saturday. The breaking day. The day the butcher comes.

Murderess, murderess, he whispers to himself. It has an allure, a scent almost. Hothouse gardenias. Lurid, but also furtive. He imagines himself breathing it as he draws Grace towards him, pressing his mouth against her. Murderess. He applies it to her throat like a brand.

Sleeping in your clothes makes you tired. The clothes are crumpled, and also your body underneath them. I feel as if I've been rolled into a bundle and thrown on the floor.

It is remarkable, I have since thought, how once a man has a few coins, no matter how he came by them, he thinks right away that he is entitled to them, and to whatever they can buy, and fancies himself cock of the walk.

On the edge of sleep I thought: It’s as if I never existed, because no trace of me remains, I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed. It is almost the same as being innocent. And then I slept.

Some called it Eve's curse but she thought that was stupid, and the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam, who as soon as there was any trouble, blamed it all on her.

For it is not always the one that strikes the blow that is the actual murderer; and Mary was done to death by that unknown gentleman, as surely as if he'd taken the knife and plunged it into her body himself.

The truth is I don’t want him watching me while I eat. I don’t want him to see my hunger. If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything. He

A great fear came over me, and my body went entirely cold, and I stood as if paralyzed with fear; for I knew that the horse was no earthly horse, but the pale horse that will be sent at the Day of Reckoning, and the rider of it is Death; and it was Death himself who stood behind me, with his arms wrapped around me as tight as iron bands, and his lipless mouth kissing my neck as if in love. But as well as the horror, I also felt a strange longing.

I see what he's after. He is a collector. He thinks all he has to do is give me an apple, and then he can collect me.

I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion;

the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam, who as soon as there was any trouble, blamed it all on her.

They say, Grace, why don’t you ever smile or laugh, we never see you smiling, and I say I suppose Miss I have gotten out of the way of it, my face won’t bend in that direction any more.

And then everything went on very quietly for a fortnight, says Dr. Jordan. He is reading aloud from my confession. Yes Sir, it did, I say. More or less quietly. What is everything? How did it go on? I beg your pardon, Sir? What did you do everyday? Oh, the usual, Sir, I say. I performed my duties. You will forgive me, says Dr. Jordan. Of what did those duties consist? I look at him. He is wearing a yellow cravat with small white squares, he is not making a joke. He really does not know. Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes, and theirs into the bargain. In that way they are like children, they do not have to think ahead, or worry about the consequences of what they do. But it's not their fault, it is only how they are brought up.

If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything.

Today she wears her habitual expression of strained anxiety; she smells of violets.

Of course you have always been an idealist, and filled with your optimistic dreams; but reality must at some time obtrude, and you are now turned thirty.

To be rendered unconscious; to lie exposed, without shame, at the mercy of others; to be touched, incised, plundered, remade - this is what they are thinking of when they look at him, with their widening eyes and slightly parted lips.

But in the closeness of the sewing room, Simon can smell her as well as look at her. He tries to pay no attention but her scent is a distracting undercurrent. She smells like smoke; smoke, and laundry soap, and the salt from her skin; and she smells of the skin itself, with its undertone of dampness, fullness, ripeness - what? Ferns and mushrooms; fruits crushed and fermenting.

He’s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he’s fifty, and even then there’s still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say.

Help is what they offer but gratitude is what they want, they roll around in it like cats in the catnip.

Where there's a doctor it's always a bad sign. Even when they are not doing the killing themselves it means a death is close, and in that way they are like ravens or crows.

I don’t know why they are all so eager to be remembered. What good will it do them? There are some things that should be forgotten by everyone, and never spoken of again.

Sometimes when I am dusting the mirror with the grapes I look at myself in it, although I know it is vanity. In the afternoon light of the parlour my skin is a pale mauve, like a faded bruise, and my teeth are greenish. I think of all the things that have been written about me - that I am inhuman female demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard forced against my will and in danger of my own life, that I was too ignorant to know how to act and that to hang me would be judicial murder, that I am fond of animals, that I am very handsome with a brilliant complexion, that I have blue eyes, that I have green eyes, that I have auburn and also have brown hair, that I am tall and also not above the average height, that I am well and decently dressed, that I robbed a dead woman to appear so, that I am brisk and smart about my work, that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper, that I have the appearance of a person rather above my humble station, that I am a good girl with a pliable nature and no harm is told of me, that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot. And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once?

I would like to be found. I would like to see. Or to be seen. I wonder if, in the eye of God, it amounts to the same thing.

For if the world treats you well, Sir, you come to believe you are deserving of it. Mary

He's coming to hate the gratitude of women. It is like being fawned on by rabbits, or like being covered with syrup: you can't get it off.

And I wondered what would become of me, and comforted myself that in a hundred years I would be dead and at peace, and in my grave; and I thought it might be less trouble altogether, to be in it a good deal sooner than that.

You should never let your picture be in a magazine or newspaper if you can help it, as you never know what ends your face may be made to serve, by others, once it has got out of your control.

They wouldn’t know mad when they saw it in any case, because a good portion of the women in the Asylum were no madder than the Queen of England. Many were sane enough when sober, as their madness came out of a bottle, which is a kind I knew very well. One of them was in there to get away from her husband, who beat her black and blue, he was the mad one but nobody would lock him up;

A shadow flits before me, Not thou, but like to thee. Ah, Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be! —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Maud, 1855.

And then I thought: 'It's for a warning,'" she continues. "You may think a bed is a peaceful thing, sir. For you it may mean rest, and comfort, and a good night's sleep. But it isn't so for everyone. There are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. It's where we are born, that's our first peril in life. It's where women give birth, which is often their last. And it's where the act takes place between men and women sir, which I will not mention to you, but I suppose you know what it is. Some call it love, others despair, merely an indignity they must suffer through. And finally beds are what we sleep in, and where we dream, and often where we die.

What mysteries remain to be revealed in the nervous system, that web of structures both material and ethereal, that network of threads that runs throughout the body, composed of a thousand Ariadne’s clues, all leading to the brain, that shadowy central den where the human bones lie scattered and the monsters lurk

The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong.

He’s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman,

...I was shut up inside that doll of myself, and my true voice could not get out.

There is a little verse I remember from a child: Needles and pins, needles and pins, When a man marries his trouble begins. It doesn’t say when a woman’s trouble begins.

Her strongest prison is of her own construct.

What is believed in society, is not always the equivalent of what is true;

The door of Reverend Verringer’s impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it.

God had come in because God is everywhere, you can’t keep him out, he is part of everything there is, so how could you ever build a wall or four walls or a door or a shut window, that he could not walk right through as if it was air.

A woman like me is always a temptation, if possible to arrange it unobserved; as whatever we may say about it later, we will not be believed.

It is my opinion that they sometimes take what is intended for us, which would not surprise me in the least, as it is dog eat dog around here and they are the bigger dogs.

Heaven, for the Presbyterians, must resemble a banking establishment, with each soul tagged and docketed, and placed in the appropriate pigeonhole.

No reply is in itself a reply.

They are entering the forest of amnesia, where things have lost their names.

One must always keeps both sides in one's head; it's the only way to anticipate the moves of one's opponent

Lying,” says MacKenzie. “A severe term, surely. Has she been lying to you, you ask? Let me put it this way—did Scheherazade lie? Not in her own eyes; indeed, the stories she told ought never to be subjected to the harsh categories of Truth and Falsehood. They belong in another realm altogether. Perhaps Grace Marks has merely been telling you what she needs to tell, in order to accomplish the desired end.

I did not give him a straight answer, because saying what you really want out loud brings bad luck, and then the good thing will never happen. It might not happen anyway, but just to make sure, you should be careful about saying what you want or even wanting anything, as you may be punished for it.

The truth is that very few understand the truth about forgiveness. It is not the culprits who need to be forgiven; rather it is the victims, because they are the ones who cause all the trouble. If they were only less weak and careless, and more foresightful, and if they would keep from blundering into difficulties, think of all the sorrow in the world that would be spared.

I never do such things, however. I only consider them. If I did them, they would be sure I had gone mad again. Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.

My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red. —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Maud, 1855.

Grace's will is of the negative female variety - she can deny and reject much more easily than she can affirm or accept. Somewhere within herself - he's seen it, if only for a moment, that conscious, even cunning look in the corner of her eye - she know she's concealing something from him. As she stitches away at her sewing, outwardly calm as a marble Madonna, she is all the while exerting her passive stubborn strength against him. A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is one of her own construction.

It's a wonder they can sit down at all, and when they walk, nothing touches their legs under the billowing skirts, except their shifts and stockings. They are like swans, drifting along on unseen feet; or else like the jellyfish in the waters of the rocky harbour near our house, when I was little, before I ever made the long sad journey across the ocean. They were bell-shaped and ruffled, gracefully waving and lovely under the sea; but if they washed up on the beach and dried out in the sun there was nothing left of them. And that is what the ladies are like: mostly water.

recently returned from Boston, where she was staying with her Aunt, to broaden her education. She has turned out a charming young woman, everything one might wish for, and displayed a courtesy and gentle kindness many would admire, and which is worth so much

The difference between a civilized man and a barbarous fiend—a madman, say - Lies, perhaps, Merely in a thin veneer of willed self-restraint.

[...] in this world you have to take your bits and ends of kindness where you can find them, as they do not grow on trees.

[...] he often talked to himself and he was the best conversationalist he knew; [...]

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.

My mother said Aunt Pauline meant kindly but had standards, which were all very well for those that could afford them.

There must be a certain freedom in not having a good name to lose.

A faithless preacher with a good manner and voice will always convert more than a limp-handed long-faced fool, no matter how Godly.

But when you cross over the border, it is like passing through air, you wouldn’t know you’d done it; as the trees on both sides of it are the same.

The line of her cheek has a marble, a classic, a simplicity; to look at her is to believe that suffering does indeed purify.

When you are sad it is best to change the subject.

Is the clue to be found in the nerves, or in the brain itself? To produce insanity, what must first be damaged, and how?

And there we were, in a kind of harmony; and the evening was so beautiful, that it made a pain in my heart, as when you cannot tell whether you are happy or sad; and I thought that if I could have a wish, it would be that nothing would ever change, and we could stay that way forever.

… for it is the fate of a woman Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is speechless, Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence. Hence is the inner life of so many suffering women Sunless and silent and deep, like subterranean rivers Running through caverns of darkness.… —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” 1858.

My letters! All dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string.… —ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1850.

but it is my true belief that it was the doctor that killed her with his knife; him and the gentleman between them. For it is not always the one that strikes the blow, that is the actual murderder;

He has tried imagining her as a prostitute—he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters—but he can’t picture any man actually paying for her services. It would be like paying to be run over by a wagon, and would be, like that experience, a distinct threat to the health.

I was not that fond of hens, as I have always preferred an animal with fur to a gaggle of frowsy, cackling birds scratching in the dirt; but if you want their eggs you have to put up with their unruly ways.

Then she lent me her red flannel petticoat until I should get one of my own, and showed me how to fold and pin the cloths, and said hat some called it Eve's curse but she thought that was stupid, and the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam, who as soon as there was any trouble, blamed it all on her.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else. —Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

And they do say that cleanliness is next to Godliness; and sometimes, when I have seen the pure white clouds billowing in the sky after a rain, I used to think that it was as if the angels themselves were hanging out their washing;

After a time he thought he knew. It was knowledge they craved; yet they could not admit to craving it, because it was forbidden knowledge — knowledge with a lurid glare to it; knowledge gained through a descent into the pit. He has been where they could never go, seen what they could never see; he has opened up women’s bodies, and peered inside. In his hand, which has just raised their own hands towards his lips, he may once have held a beating female heart. Thus he is one of the dark trio — the doctor, the judge, the executioner — and shares with them the powers of life and death. To be rendered unconscious; to lie exposed, without shame, at the mercy of others; to be touched, incised, plundered, remade — this is what they are thinking of when they look at him, with their widening eyes and slightly parted lips.

Have they forgotten that I'm in here? They'll have to bring more food, or at least more water, or else I will starve, I will shrivel, my skin will dry out, all yellow like old linen; I will turn into a skeleton, I will be found months, years, centuries from now on, and they will say Who is this, she must have slipped our mind, Well sweep all those bones and rubbish into the corner, but save the buttons, no sense in having them go to waste, there's no help for it now.

But the waves kept moving, with the white wake of the ship traced in them for an instant, and then smoothed over by the water. And it was as if my own footsteps were being erased behind me, the footsteps I’d made as a child on the beaches and pathways of the land I’d left, and the footsteps I’d made on this side of the ocean, since coming here; all the traces of me, smoothed over and rubbed away as if they had never been, like polishing the black tarnish from the silver, or drawing your hand across dry sand. On the edge of sleep I thought: It’s as if I never existed, because no trace of me remains, I have left no marks. And that way I cannot be followed. It is almost the same as being innocent. And then I slept.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.

On my Tree of Paradise, I intend to put a border of snakes entwined; they will look like vines or just a cable pattern to others, as I will make the eyes very small, but they will be snakes to me; as without a snake or two, the main part of the story would be missing.

It is very odd to be standing in a locked room in the Penitentiary, speaking with a strange man about France and Italy and Germany. A travelling man. He must be a wanderer, like Jeremiah the peddler. But Jeremiah travelled to earn his bread, and these other sorts of men are rich enough already. They go on voyages because they are curious. They amble around the world and stare at things, they sail across the oceans as if there's nothing to it at all, and if it goes ill with them in one place they simply pick up and move along to another.

I don’t want to be left by myself in this room. The walls are too empty, there are no pictures on them nor curtains on the little high-up window, nothing to look at and so you look at the wall, and after you do that for a time, there are pictures on it after all, and red flowers growing.

The mind, he reflects, is like a house - thoughts which the owner no longer wishes to display, or those which arouse painful memories, are thrust out of sight, and consigned to attic or cellar; and in forgetting, as in the storage of broken furniture, there is surely an element of will at work.

The truth may well turn out to be stranger than we think,” says Simon. “It may be that much of what we are accustomed to describe as evil, and evil freely chosen, is instead an illness due to some lesion of the nervous system, and that the Devil himself is simply a malformation of the cerebrum.

I had now been a servant for three years, and could act the part well enough by that time. But Nancy was very changeable, two-faced you might call her, and it wasn't easy to tell what she wanted from one hour to the next. One minute she would be up on her high horse and ordering me about and finding fault, and the next minute she would be my best friend, or pretend to be, and would put her arm through mine, and say I looked tired, and should sit down with her, and have a cup of tea. It is much harder to work for such a person, as just when you are curtsying and Ma'am-ing them, they turn around and upbraid you for being so stiff and formal, and want to confide in you, and expect the same in return. You cannot ever do the correct thing with them.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered

There is something depressing to the spirits about a birthday, especially when alone

The inheritance of a sound mind in a healthy body would be the best legacy of all, to leave to one's children

No one in the Family has ever concerned himself with Lunatics before, although your Grandfather was a Quaker clergyman.

What is believed in society, is not always the equivalent of what is true; but as regards a woman’s reputation, it amounts to the same thing.

I would rather be a murderess than a murderer, if those are the only choices.

it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.

a tray which is plain in design, but nonetheless of silver. A Methodist tray: not flamboyant, but quietly affirmative of its own worth.

it was like having another bum tied on top of your real one and the two of them following you around like a tin bucket tied to a pig,

He always felt that to put his own safety at risk was worth a good deal more than barking at others from behind the protection of a fence.

guilt comes to you not from the things you’ve done, but from the things that others have done to you.

The imperfect is our paradise. —WALLACE STEVENS, “The Poems of Our Climate,” 1938.

next neighbour, who was an elderly woman by the name of Mrs.

Although from you I far must roam, Do not be broken hearted, We two who in the Soul are One Are never truly parted. Your Lucy.

Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes, and theirs into the bargain.

… for it is the fate of a woman Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is speechless, Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence.

the red flowers, the shining

Whatever may have happened through these years, God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie. —WILLIAM MORRIS, “The Defence of Guenevere.

I have no Tribunal. —EMILY DICKINSON, Letters.

I cannot tell you what the light is, but I can tell you what it is not.… What is the motive of the light? What is the light? —EUGENE MARAIS, The Soul of the White Ant.

Come, see real flowers of this painful world. —BASHŌ.

If she were to smile, her face would crack like an eggshell. There must be a school for ugliness, thinks Simon, where such women are sent to be trained.

On the palm of my hand there’s a disaster. I must have been born with it. I carry it with me wherever I go. When he touched me, the bad luck came off on him.

We make everything we wear or use here, awake or asleep; so I have made this bed, and now I am lying in it.

He smells of shaving soap, the English kind, and of ears; and of the leather of his boots.

One does not make love to a minor religious edifice.

Se todos nós fôssemos julgados por nossos pensamentos, seríamos todos enforcados.

But when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.

My mother said Aunt Pauline meant kindly but had standars, which were all very well for those that could afford them.

Agnes did the talking, and said it was a sudden fever, and for a woman as pious as she was, lied very well;

I have read the [...] scribblings, which I consigned to the fire where they belong — and where they for once cast a little light, which they certainly would not have done otherwise.

Would that be me you're addressing? said McDermott. No it would not, I said with a cool manner as I walked by him. I thought I could tell what he had in mind, and it was not original.

One young fellow pointed to another steamer in the distance, and said it was the Lady of the Lake, a United States vessel which until recently was thought to be the fastest boat on the Lake; but she had just lost a trial-of-speed race to the new Royal Mail Standard boat, the Eclipse, which outran her by four minutes and a half. And I said didn't that make him proud, and he said no, because he had bet a dollar on the Lady. And all present laughed. Then something came clear to me which I used to wonder about. There is a quilt pattern called Lady of the Lake, which I thought was named for the poem; but I could never find any lady in the pattern, nor any lake. But now I saw the boat was named for the poem, and the quilt was named for the boat; because it was a pinwheel design, which must have stood for the paddle going around. And I thought that things did make sense, and did have a design to them, if only you pondered them long enough. And so perhaps might be with recent events, which at the moment seemed to me entirely senseless; and finding out the reason for the quilt pattern was a lesson to me, to have faith.

Simon walks back to the house alone. The night is clear and warm, with a moon, almost full, enclosed in a nimbus of mist; the air smells of mown grass and horse manure, with an undertone of dog.

For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad. —CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, “Remember,” 1849.

Bir hikayenin göbeğindeyseniz, hikaye falan değildir o, bir kargaşadır; karanlıkta bir kükremedir, körlüktür, cam kırıklarıyla tahta kıymıklarından oluşan bir yığındır, hortuma yakalanmış bir eve benzer, yahut belki buzdağları arasına sıkışmış ya da çağlayana sürüklenen bir gemiye, güvertede kimsenin gücü yetmemektedir onu durdurmaya. Olursa ancak sonradan hikaye olur. Kendinize ya da bir başkasına anlatırken.

a good portion of the women in the Asylum were no madder than the Queen of England. Many were sane enough when sober, as their madness came out of a bottle, which is a kind I knew very well. One of them was in there to get away from her husband, who beat her black and blue, he was the mad one but nobody would lock him up; and another said she went mad in the autumns, as she had no house and it was warm in the Asylum, and if she didn’t do a fair job of running mad she would freeze to death; but then in the spring she would become sane again because it was good weather and she could go off and tramp in the woods and fish,

Er beginnt allmählich die Dankbarkeit von Frauen zu hassen. Sie ist, als würde man von Kaninchen umschwänzelt oder mit Sirup übergossen. Man wird sie nicht wieder los. Diese Dankbarkeit hemmt einen und macht einen hilflos. Jedesmal, wenn eine Frau ihm dankbar ist, möchte er ein kaltes Bad nehmen. Ihre Dankbarkeit ist nicht echt. In Wirklichkeit meinen sie, daß er ihnen dankbar sein sollte. Insgeheim verachten sie ihn.

I reached the privy and emptied the slop pail, and so forth. And so forth, Grace? asks Dr.Jordan. I look at him. Really if he does not know what you do in a privy there is no hope for him. What I did was, I hoisted my skirts and sat down above the buzzing flies, on the same seat everyone in the house sat on, lady or lady's maid, they both piss and it smells the same, and not like lilac neither, as Mary Whitney used to say. What was in there for wiping was an old copy of the Godey's Ladies' Book; I always looked at the pictures before using them. Most were of the latest fashions, but some were of duchesses from England and high-society ladies in New York and the like. You should never let your picture be in a magazine or newspaper if you can help it, as you never know what ends your face may be made to serve, by others, once it has got out of your control. But I do not say any of this to Dr. Jordan. And so forth, I say firmly, because And so forth is all he is entitled to. Just because he pesters me to know everything is no reason for me to tell him.

Grace Marks glances at you with a sidelong, stealthy look; her eye never meets yours, and after a furtive regard, it invariably bends its gaze upon the ground. She looks like a person rather above her humble station.…

So with this Earthly Paradise it is, If ye will read aright, and pardon me, Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea, Where tossed about all hearts of men must be.… —WILLIAM MORRIS,

Over the years in prison, when I have been by myself, as I am a good deal of the time, I have closed my eyes and turned my head towards the sun, and I have seen red and orange that were like the brightness of those quilts.

outwardly calm as a marble Madonna, she is all the while exerting her passive stubborn strength against him. A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.

When a child, I have played games with a blindfold obscuring my vision. Now I am like that child. Blindfolded, groping my way, not knowing where I am going, or if I am in the proper direction. Someday, someone will remove that blindfold.

It is commendable to wish to relieve human suffering, but surely the insane, like idiots and cripples, owe their state to Almighty Providence, and one should not attempt to reverse decisions which are certainly just, although inscrutable to us.

It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other.… Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions. —NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 1844.

The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong. The pattern of this quilt is called the Tree of Paradise, and whoever named that pattern said better than she knew, as the Bible does not say Trees. It says there were two different trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge; but I believe there was only the one, and that the Fruit of Life and the Fruit of Good and Evil were the same. And if you ate of it you would die, but if you didn’t eat of it you would die also; although if you did eat of it, you would be less bone-ignorant by the time you got around to your death. Such an arrangement would appear to be more the way life is.

They are hypocrites, they think the church is a cage to keep God in, so he will stay locked up there and no go wandering about the earth during the week, poking his nose into their business, and looking into the depths and darkness and doubleness of their hearts, and their lack of true charity; and they believe they need only be bothered about him on Sundays when they have their best clothes on and their faces straight, and their hands washed and their gloves on, and their stories all prepared. But God is everywhere, and cannot be caged in, as men can.

The newspapers wrote that he performed heroically against overwhelming odds. Though I don’t know why they called it pleading, as he was not pleading but trying to make all of the witnesses appear immoral or malicious, or else mistaken. I wonder if he ever believed a word I said.

Mary me dijo: ahora ya eres una mujer, y eso me hizo llorar. Entonces ella me abrazó y me consoló mejor de lo que hubiera podido hacerlo mi madre, que siempre estaba demasiado ocupada, cansada o enferma. Después me prestó su enagua de franela roja hasta que yo tuviera una y me enseñó cómo doblar y sujetar los paños y me dijo que algunos lo llamaban «la maldición de Eva», cosa que a ella le parecía una estupidez, ya que la verdadera maldición de Eva era tener que aguantar las idioteces de Adán que, en cuanto surgió un problema, le echó toda la culpa a ella.

Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve; For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad. —CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, “Remember,” 1849.

The birds were singing around me, but I reflected that the very birds were strangers to me, for I did not even know their names; and that seemed to me the saddest of all, and the tears began to roll down my cheeks; and I did not dry them, but indulged myself in weeping for several minutes.

I wake up at cock crow and I know where I am. I'm in the parlour. I'm in the scullery. I'm in the cellar. I'm in my cell, under the coarse prison blanket, which I likely hemmed myself. We make everything we wear or use here, awake or asleep; so I have made this bed, and now I am lying in it.

For if people wish to believe a thing, and long for it and depend on it to be true, and feel the better for it, is it cheating to help them to their own belief, by such an insubstantial thing as a name? Is it not rather a charity, and a human kindness? And when he put the thing that way, it had a better light to it.

He meets, by heavenly chance express, The destined maid; some hidden hand Unveils to him that loveliness Which others cannot understand. His merits in her presence grow, To match the promise in her eyes, And round her happy footsteps blow The authentic airs of paradise.… —COVENTRY PATMORE, The Angel in the House, 1854.

Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick Of mischief happened to me, God knows when— In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then, Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shuts—you’re inside the den! —ROBERT BROWNING, “ ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,’ ” 1855.

The sermon was on the subject of Divine Grace, and how we could be saved by it alone, and not through any efforts on our part...because Divine Grace was a mystery, and the recipients of it were known to God alone; and although Scripture said that by their fruits you would know them, the fruits meant were spiritual fruits...

Dr. Jordan sits across from me. He smells of shaving soap, the English kind, and of ears; and of the leather o his boots. It is a reassuring smell and I always look forward to it, men that wash being preferable in this respect to those that do not What he has put on the table today is a potato, but he has not yet asked me about it, so it is just sitting there between us. I don't know what he expects me to say about it, except that I have peeled a good many of them in my time, and eaten them too, a fresh new potato is a joy with a little butter and salt, and parsley if available, and even the big old ones can bake up very beautiful; but they are nothing to have a long conversation about. Some potatoes look like babies' faces, or else like animals, and I once saw one that looked like a cat. But this one looks just like a potato, no more and no less. Sometimes I think that Dr. Jordan is a little off in the head. But I would rather talk with him about potatoes, if that is what he fancies, than not talk to him at all.

The reason they want to see me is that I am a celebrated murderess. Or that is what has been written down. When I first saw it I was surprised, because they say Celebrated Singer and Celebrated Poetess and Celebrated Spiritualist and Celebrated Actress, but what is there to celebrate about murder? All the same, Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word—musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor. Murderer is merely brutal. It’s like a hammer, or a lump of metal. I would rather be a murderess than a murderer, if those are the only choices.

But if Grace Marks repent at last, And for her sins atone, Then when she comes to die, she’ll stand At her Redeemer’s throne. At her Redeemer’s throne she’ll stand, And she’ll be cured of woe, And He her bloodied hands will wash, And she’ll be white as snow. And she will be as white as snow, And into Heaven will pass, And she will dwell in Paradise, In Paradise at last.

At the Governor’s residence, Simon is directed to the parlour, which is almost large enough to be called a drawing room. All possible surfaces of it are upholstered; the colours are those of the inside of the body—the maroon of kidneys, the reddish purple of hearts, the opaque blue of veins, the ivory of teeth and bones. He imagines the sensation it would produce if he were to announce this aperçu out loud.

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

When I came back out there was a strange light in the kitchen, as if there was a film of silver over everything, like frost only smoother, like water running thinly down over flat stones; and then my eyes were opened and I knew it was because God had come into the house and this was the silver that covered Heaven. God had come in because God is everywhere, you can't keep him out, he is part of everything there is, so how could you build a wall or four walls or a door or a shut window, that he could not walk right through as if it was air. I said, "What do you want here, but he did not answer, he just kept on being silver, so I went out to milk the cow; because the only thing to do about God is to go on with what you were doing anyway, since you can't ever stop him or get any reasons out of him. There is a Do this or a Do that with God, but never any Because.

And since that time I have thought, why is it that women have chosen to sew such flags, and then to lay them on the tops of beds? For they make the bed the most noticeable thing in a room. And then I have thought, it’s for a warning. Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night’s sleep. But it isn’t so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed. It is where we are born, and that is our first peril in life; and it is where the women give birth, which is often their last. And it is where the act takes place between men and women that I will not mention to you, Sir, but I suppose you know what it is; and some call it love, and others despair, or else merely an indignity which they must suffer through. And finally beds are what we sleep in, and where we dream, and often where we die.

At the time of my visit, there were only forty women in the Penitentiary. This speaks much for the superior moral training of the feebler sex. My chief object in visiting their department was to look at the celebrated murderess, Grace Marks, of whom I had heard a great deal, not only from the public papers, but from the gentleman who defended her upon her trial, and whose able pleading saved her from the gallows, on which her wretched accomplice closed his guilty career. —SUSANNA MOODIE, Life in the Clearings, 1853.

Pienso en todas las cosas que se han escrito sobre mí: que soy un demonio inhumano, que soy una víctima inocente de un sinvergüenza que me forzó en contra de mi voluntad y con riesgo de mi propia vida, que era demasiado ignorante para saber comportarme y que el hecho de ahorcarme sería un asesinato judicial, que me gustan los animales, que soy muy guapa y tengo una tez preciosa, que tengo los ojos azules, que tengo los ojos verdes, que tengo el cabello cobrizo y que lo tengo también castaño, que soy alta y que no supero la talla media, que visto bien y con modestia, que robé a una muerta para vestir así, que soy enérgica y diligente en el trabajo, que soy de talante arisco y temperamento pendenciero, que mi aspecto es mejor que el que correspondería a una persona de mi humilde condición, que soy una buena chica de naturaleza dócil y nada malo se ha dicho de mí, que soy astuta y taimada, que tengo el cerebro reblandecido y soy poco más que una idiota. Y yo me pregunto cómo puedo ser todas esas cosas tan distintas al mismo tiempo.

The reason they want to see me is that I am a celebrated murderess. Or that is what has been written down. When I first saw it I was surprised, because they say Celebrated Singer and Celebrated Poetess and Celebrated Spiritualist and Celebrated Actress, but what is there to celebrate about murder? All the same, Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word—musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.

But then I said to myself, What can't be cured must be endured...and I looked up at the branches of the apple tree above me, where the small green apples were already forming and at the patches of blue sky visible beyond, and attempted to cheer myself up, reflecting that only a benevolent God, who had our good at heart, would have created so much beauty, and that whatever burdens were laid upon me were surely trials, to test my strength and faith, as with the early Christians, and Job, and the martyrs. But as I have said, thoughts about God often make me drowsy; and I fell asleep.

The truth is that very few understand the truth about forgiveness. It is not the culprits who need to be forgiven; rather it is the victims, because they are the ones who cause all the trouble. If they were only less weak and careless, and more foresightful, and if they would keep from blundering into difficulties, think of all the sorrow in the world that would be spared. I had a rage in my heart for many years, against Mary Whitney, and especially against Nancy Montgomery; against the two of them both, for letting themselves be done to death in the way that they did, and for leaving me behind with the full weight of it. For a long time I could not find it in me to pardon them.

It was Bellini’s Sonnambula: a simple and chaste village girl, Amina, is found asleep in the count’s bedroom, having walked there unconsciously; her fiancé and the villagers denounce her as a whore, despite the Count’s protests, which are based on his superior scientific knowledge; but when Amina is seen walking in her sleep across a perilous bridge, which collapses behind her into the rushing stream, her innocence is proven beyond a doubt and she awakes to restored happiness. A parable of the soul, as his Latin teacher had pointed out so sententiously, Amina being a crude anagram for anima. But why, Simon has asked himself, was the soul depicted as unconscious? And, even more intriguingly: while Amina slept, who was doing the walking?

Martedì, alle dodici e dieci circa, nella prigione nuova di questa città, a James McDermott, assassino del signor Kinnear, è stata applicata la più grave pena prevista dalla legge. Una folla immensa di uomini, donne e bambini aspettava con ansia di poter assistere agli ultimi tra­vagliati istanti del colpevole. Quali possano essere i sentimenti di quelle donne che sono accorse numerose da vicino e da lontano, nel fango e sotto la pioggia, per presenziare all'orribile spettacolo, non arriviamo a immaginarlo. Osiamo tuttavia affermare che non erano precisamente gentili né raffinati. Lo sciagurato criminale, in quel terribile momento, ha dato prova della stessa freddezza e teme­rarietà che ha caratterizzato il suo contegno fin dall'arresto. «Toronto Mirror», 23 novembre 1843

And then she sat me down and combed out my hair, which was gentle and soothing, and she said, Grace, you will be a beauty, soon you will turn the men’s heads. The worst ones are the gentlemen, who think they are entitled to anything they want; and when you go out to the privy at night, they’re drunk then, they lie in wait for you and then it is snatch and grab, there’s no reasoning with them, and if you must, you should give them a kick between the legs where they’ll feel it; and it is always better to lock your door, and to use the chamber pot. But any kind of man will try the same; and they’ll start promising things, they’ll say they will do whatever you want; but you must be very careful what you ask, and you must never do anything for them until they have performed what they promised; and if there’s a ring, there must be a parson to go with it.

(From Chapter 9: Hearts and Gizzards) I’m lying on the hard and narrow bed, on the mattress made of coarse ticking, which is what they call the covering of a mattress, though why do they call it that as it is not a clock. The mattress is filled with dry straw that crackles like a fire when I turn over, and when I shift it whispers to me, hush hush. It’s dark as a stone in this room, and hot as a roasting heart; if you stare into the darkness with your eyes open you are sure to see something after a time. I hope it will not be flowers. But this is the time they like to grow, the red flowers, the shining red peonies which are like satin, which are like splashes of paint. The soil for them is emptiness, it is empty space and silence. I whisper, Talk to me; because I would rather have talking than the slow gardening that takes place in silence, with the red satin petals dripping down the wall. I think I sleep. [...] I’m outside, at night. There are the trees, there is the pathway, and the snake fence with half a moon shining, and my bare feet on the gravel. But when I come around to the front of the house, the sun is just going down; and the white pillars of the house are pink, and the white peonies are glowing red in the fading light. My hands are numb, I can’t feel the ends of my fingers. There’s the smell of fresh meat, coming up from the ground and all around, although I told the butcher we wanted none. On the palm of my hand there’s a disaster. I must have been born with it. I carry it with me wherever I go. When he touched me, the bad luck came off on him. I think I sleep. I wake up at cock crow and I know where I am. I’m in the parlour. I’m in the scullery. I’m in the cellar. I’m in my cell, under the coarse prison blanket, which I likely hemmed myself. We make everything we wear or use here, awake or asleep; so I have made this bed, and now I am lying in it.

My hair is coming out from under my cap. Red hair of an ogre. A wild beast, the newspaper said. A monster. When they come with my dinner I will put the slop bucket over my head and hide behind the door, and that will give them a fright. If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided with one. I never do such things, however. I only consider them. If I did them, they would be sure I had gone mad again. Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in. I don't want to be left by myself in this room. The walls are too empty, there are no pictures on them nor curtains on the little high-up window, nothing to look at and so you look at the wall, and after you do that for a time, there are pictures on it after all, and red flowers growing. I think I sleep.