Nicola

“You’re a monster, do you know that?” “Yes, oddly enough, I do.” He threw his arm across Patroclus’s shoulders. “Come on, let’s eat.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“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

“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

“In later life, wherever I went, I always looked for the women of Troy who'd been scattered all over the Greek world. That skinny old woman with brown-spotted hands shuffling to answer her master's door, can that really be Queen Hecuba, who, as a young and beautiful girl, newly married, had led the dancing in King Priam's hall? Or that girl in the torn and shabby dress, hurrying to fetch water from the well, can that be one of Priam's daughters? Or the ageing concubine, face paint flaking over the wrinkles in her skin, can that really be Andromache, who once, as Hector's wife, stood proudly on the battlements of Troy with her baby son in her arms?”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls