Tory Jensen

“Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.

We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Our lives are but episodes in its majestic march through time. In sum, society is the walls of imprisonments in history.”
― Peter L Berger

“I hope the world will little note nor long remember what you are saying here.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman

“She had slept twelve hours, and her shoulders ached from weariness.”
― Harper Lee, Go Set a Watchman