Katie

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

“Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles … How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“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

“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