Katie

“As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body, he says: "'I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son."
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: "And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“The mother seems relieved to have heard that this affliction might be psychological, as if the failings of the mind are any less destructive than those of the body.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“How can knowing something be sinful?”
― Philip Pullman, La Belle Sauvage

“This is what free people never understand. A slave isn't a person who's being treated as a thing. A slave is a thing, as much in her own estimation as in anybody else's.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls