The Daughter of Doctor Moreau

If she’d been a siren luring him to the bottom of the sea, he would have followed. If she’d been a gorgon he’d have let himself be turned into stone.

She wished to be unafraid and for the world to be good. Neither thing seemed possible.

Everywhere Montgomery had been he’d spied the same misery under a different guise. In England it was in the factories, in Latin America it was in the fields. There was always someone with a little more money, a little more power, and he owned you.

For the world is a constant compromise, a greeting of the other and of yourself.

If she'd been a siren luring him to the bottom of the sea, he would have followed. If she'd been a gorgon he'd have let himself be turned into stone. Let him be mangled and devoured.

When she looked in the mirror she felt as though there was an invisible crack in it, perhaps in her.

I don’t want anything to change,” she said. “It’s inevitable.

War is seldom fair for any party involved.

Pain must be endured, for without it there’d be no sweetness.

He was thirty-five years old and couldn’t remember who he’d wanted to be at twenty. He’d lost himself long ago.

Maybe it was not the only thing that had broken him. The brunt of cruelty, of the world, had taken its toll and marked him. But she’d been his solace and his hope, the balm from ugliness and wrongdoings. Then she’d left him and admitted that she’d never really loved him.

Copulating with me won’t make you any more human. It’ll make you sadder, when you open your eyes and see my face instead of his. Copulating with me won’t make up for what happened in the lab, it won’t wipe away the things your father confessed, and it won’t heal him.

As Montgomery had said, what she wanted was not to be found at the bottom of a bottle, but she had no idea where it might be.

Love at that age was a fire that sparked quickly, so it shouldn’t have surprised him when she spoke earnestly, but it still stung to hear her voice her affection with such ease. She’d known the boy for a second and a half, and already her lips curled with honeyed sweetness when she spoke his name. Give her a month and she’d be ready to press an asp to her breast if the spoiled brat ever left her.

Have you ever had the chance to do evil in order to produce some good?

That strange dividing line inside her body, the crack that seemed to nestle at the center of her being, now felt deep and solid. A fault line, filled with dread and anger. It scared her, this capacity for strength, for violence. It also awed her.

At nights, one could stand in the courtyard and look up at a rectangle of night sky and survey the stars, but in the daytime the sun bathed the ivy growing on the walls and made the decorative tiles of the fountain glisten. Light, air, and water mixed together to produce a realm of enchantment.

the world is a constant compromise, a greeting of the other and of yourself.

We all have a path to travel and a fate written in the book of days.

he remained here, he’d grow mad like Moreau, who spent his days in obsessive pursuit of a secret that could never be had.

We all have a animal double, Englishman.

He held that Bible up and read from it, but I don’t think he knew the words.

Have you exhausted the self-pity?

Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Have you forgotten your lessons?” “I can quote scripture, too. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger.

In her pirate novels the women were kidnapped or met their lovers in exciting ways. To be courted implied a mundane process akin to the cooking of beans or the washing of linen.

She wishes to take flight. If she had wings she’d have reached the horizon.

Her father had been entirely indifferent to such structured learning. Schools leave you without ambition, he said.

Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.

The problem is Mr. Darwin has found an answer, but not the proper one.

He’d loved her because she was different from him, but in the end that was what broke them.