Bard Ampora

“Later, you will learn that a common feature of domestic abuse is "dislocation." That is to say, the victim has just moved somewhere new or she's somewhere where she doesn't speak the language, or has been otherwise uprooted from her support network, her friends or family, her ability to communicate. She is made vulnerable by her circumstance, her isolation. Her only ally is her abuser, which is to say she has no ally at all.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“And so she has to struggle against an unchangeable landscape that has been hammered into existence by nothing less than time itself; a house that is too big to dismantle by hand; a situation too complex and overwhelming to master on her own.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“rather because I didn't know her, not really, until I did. She was a stranger because something essential was shielded, released in tiny bursts until it became a flood - a flood of what I realized I did not know. Afterward I would mourn her as if she'd died, because something had: someone we created together.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“The Dream House was never just the Dream House. It was, in turn, a convent of promise (herb garden, wine, writing across the table from each other), a den of debauchery (fucking with the windows open, waking up with mouth on mouth, the low, insistent murmur of fantasy), a haunted house (none of this can really be happening), a prison (need to get out need to get out), and, finally, a dungeon of memory. In dreams it sits behind a green door, for reasons you have never understood. The door was not green.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House