The Book Of The Unnamed Midwife Quotes

There is no argument to be had with faith.

It does no good to tell a beautiful woman how beautiful she is. If she already knows, it gives her power over the fool who tells her. If she does not, there is nothing that can be said to make her believe it. Dusty did not know everything, but she knew that.

Scent is the key to the door of memory.

Find some people, wish you were alone. Live alone, wish for people.

What disease cannot do, people accomplish with astonishing ease.

I would be happy to defend you ladies,” Duke said with a shine in his eyes. Every man on earth thinks his dick is magic. Alex could hear Roxanne saying it in her head the day they had met.

It does no good to tell a beautiful woman how beautiful she is. If she already knows, it gives her power over the fool who tells her. If she does not, there is nothing that can be said to make her believe it.

They lit candles against the dark and waited. Without birth, life is only that wait.

Scent is the key to the door of memory. For a minute, she let herself live in it.

Time stopped a long time ago. Time was never time at all.

One by one, they were lost and found.

Still a midwife. Thing being born is the world. New, ugly baby world. Mission,

Nobody chooses to be a victim, but after a lifetime of practice, it just happens.

Some people had been waiting their whole lives to live lawlessly, and they were the first to take to the streets. Some people knew that would happen; they knew better than to open their doors when they heard cries of help. Others didn’t. What disease cannot do, people accomplish with astonishing ease.

When the sirens quit, the rules gave out. Some people had been waiting their whole lives to live lawlessly, and they were the first to take to the streets. Some people knew what would happen; they knew better than to open their doors when they heard cries of help. Other's didn't. What disease cannot do, people accomplish with astonishing ease.

Out in the lost world were hundreds of soldiers who had been sent abroad before the end of it all and could not be brought home. In the wilds of Afghanistan and the ancient cities of Iraq, they were making their way. At bases in Europe, they were holding their ground against the locals only by firepower. When that ran out, they would be taken. Peace corps kids in Africa realized they could not swim home, would never see home again. Tourists all over Asia, the Caribbean, stranded in airports, forgotten in consulates, lived long enough to face the terror of permanence in strange lands. Cruise ships drifted full of plague dead, a few unlucky souls left alive on some.

Do you ever want to have kids?” She looked at him levelly. He did not intend to be cruel. No one who presses this question does; it’s just something they desperately need to nail down about you. To know, and put you down as normal or abnormal.

Public works failed, and disaster followed, but no disaster is faster, more assured, or crueler than a lack of water.

Women and children died in childbirth, but the fury to impregnate had dimmed somewhat. Death slowed down. People had migrated and coalesced into settlements and villages, pooling knowledge and resources. They lit candles against the dark and waited. Without birth, life is only that wait.

The Unnamed was Etta’s hero. Not as a Midwife, but as a survivor, a person who could be anything they had to be to survive.

All women, come to the Republic of Costa Rica, where you will be cared for as the mothers of a new civilization.

Books in, books out. Read novels, write a diary. Paper in your hands and silence in your mouth. It’s

decided

A tall, dark-skinned man stood at a gas grill, cooking an assortment of pupusas and

cooking an assortment of pupusas and

She sat them down with bottles of water and went to the nearest houses where she had been raiding. She came back with a bottle of olives, a can of peaches, and a pile of women’s clothes.

His voice was low, sweet, cozening. It was the voice she had heard a thousand times before.

she missed conversation. That moment of connection, of being understood that passed easily between equals.

The earth grew quiet, and everything seemed to teem with life and hold its breath, waiting.

She wasn’t sure she could talk if she wanted to. Her voice was something that fell away, unneeded.

She gave herself the luxury of a few days of madness. They were dark and deep and held in them the wreck of the entirety of civilization. It crumbles in the individual as it does in the world. There are battles and accidents; there are collapses and plagues. There is silence only when one side wins or everyone has died.

When she was lonely, she tortured herself with the idea that it could be worse.

She was a silent, thoughtless thing. Nothing interested her.

I’d be annoyed except that I benefit from it.

Every woman in labor says she can’t do it. Couldn’t stop what was happening, but I could make it easier. All the same. Still

How did we do it the first time? They didn’t know, either, and they never wrote anything down. There

Covered with snow on a clear day, the houses looked cheery and well cared for. They also looked empty. Dusty thought about empty houses in little towns like this all over the world, with men going and gone and no women left inside. Houses without housewives. No cooking and cleaning, no humming and apron-wearing wives and mothers like in the old sitcoms. No rushing minivans driven by lithe women in yoga pants whose children were well behaved and spoke Mandarin. No soap-opera-addicted, overweight, neglectful trailer trash with a dozen kids running around screaming, their mouths always stained with Kool-Aid. Every man in Huntsville remembered another life, expecting to come home every day to find someone there. All the empty houses sat. No one numbered the silent days.

I am the dolphin,

There is no such things as safe wanting. Safe wanting always turns into ownership. Desire turns to chains faster than you can breath in to say no. Be careful what you decide you're going to be. Outside the walls of city like Nowhere, women become things.

There is no such things as safe wanting. Safe wanting always turns into ownership. Desire turns to chains faster than you can breath in to say no. Be careful what you decide you're going to be. Outside the walls of cities like Nowhere, women become things.

Might as well give the kid a taste of the lost world before it’s gone forever.

His last thought was that to die in such peace in a world like this was the most privileged and selfish act he had ever committed.

What does it matter? Die here, die there. Die now, die later. Might as well go.

It felt so alien to be naked, she could not quite own or inhabit her body. It was becoming a stranger to her.

Dusty did not want to hope. She tried to keep hope out of her, shutting all the doors and locking them with the keys of reason and evidence and precedent. Still, she could feel it seeping in, incorporeal and deathless, refusing to be refused.

It was too intimate, too odd, and she found herself deeply uncomfortable

Hope was with her; it would not go away.

If they could have compared notes, one colony of survivors to another, they would have found that the number of successful human births on Earth that year had been zero. But they did not know, and so hope persisted.

This is supposed to be my personal scripture.

Yeah, but they’re not all like that.” “Maybe they didn’t used to be. What else is there now?