Alias Grace 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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;

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

… 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.

I, the most important passenger, the youth who had once been the glorious god Apollo, was forced to sit in the back of the dragon. Oh, the indignities I had suffered since Zeus stripped me of my divine powers! It wasn’t enough that I was now a sixteen-year-old mortal with the ghastly alias Lester Papadopoulos. It wasn’t enough that I had to toil upon the earth doing (ugh) heroic quests until I could find a way back into my father’s good graces, or that I had a case of acne which simply would not respond to over-the-counter zit medicine. Despite my New York State junior driver’s license, Leo Valdez didn’t trust me to operate his aerial bronze steed!

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.