“We are who we are. Sometimes, no matter how much someone might want to, they can’t escape that.”
“I want to hide, fold into the shadows and become invisible so no-one can look at me any more.”
“We have never had a class on how to say no to men while simultaneously never saying no to them.”
“For now they are just girls who are making the wrong choices. They’re ‘whores’. But what if they don’t realize that they’re making the wrong choices? What if the path they are on just has different signposts to ours?”
“Why, isabel? Why are you doing this to yourself? To your body?'
And why are you doing this to me? is the awful, selfish thought that is left unsaid.
'Because I can,' she answers, and I shiver as she unconsciously echoes chastity-ruth.
'But-'
'Because it's my body,' she cuts in. 'Isn't it?”
“She's beautiful, but it's a faded beauty now, as if she's been washed too many times.”
“I dream of things I know nothing about.”
“She catches sight of herself in her video-feed, her face contorted with fury. Wiping spittle from the sides of her mouth, she reaches behind her to grab her lip gloss and reapplies it. “And don’t even start thinking about what a bitch I am,” she says. Her eyes are steady, the heat receding from her skin. “This is not my fault. I’m just doing what we have been trained to do. This is who we are, freida. This is who we were designed to be.”
“All eves are created to be perfect but, over time, they seem to develop flaws. Comparing yourself to your sisters is a useful way of identifying these flaws, but you must then take the necessary steps to improve yourself. There is always room for Improvement.”
“I'm a good girl. I am pretty. I am always happy-go-lucky.”
“I can't even remember the first time I saw a porno. I presume I must have been shocked, frightened even, but after watching another and another and another they sort of blend into nothingness.”
“It’s true, I am skinny. My bones jostle underneath my skin, fighting to be the first one to pierce my flesh.”
“So you've made a few bad decisions. So have I. So has Elias. So has everyone attempting to do something difficult. That doesn't mean that you give up, you fool. Do you understand?”
“While spinning daily on its own axis, the earth also orbits the sun (again in an anti-clockwise direction) on a path which is slightly elliptical rather than completely circular. It pursues this orbit at truly breakneck speed, travelling as far along it in an hour – 66,600 miles – as the average motorist will drive in six years. To bring the calculations down in scale, this means that we are hurtling through space much faster than any bullet, at the rate of 18.5 miles every second. In the time that it has taken you to read this paragraph, we have voyaged about 550 miles farther along earth’s path around the sun.3”
“Boys and girls hid in the library stacks or behind the gym and flew at each other with no promise of love or even kindness, tasting one another in clumsly attempts to steal pleasure before they could be hurt or hated.”
“Her parents kissed her on each side. Her mother took both her hands now and held them against her cheek, as if in prayer. “We tried everything to get Hannah out. We took her on long vacations, we sent her to live with my cousin in Atlanta, we tried traditional church. But she went to California to join the temple commune. There was nothing we could do. The law wasn’t on our side, Hannah wasn’t on our side. The cult even had armed bodyguards to keep parents like us from snatching our children back.”
“And once Father Lucas said to me, 'Be simple, Matthew, life is a simple book, and an open book, read and be simple as the beasts in the field; just being miserable isn't enough -- you've got to know how.' So I got to thinking and I said to myself, 'This is a terrible thing that Father Lucas has put on me -- be simple like the beasts and yet think and harm nobody.”
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