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This much became clear to Sally over the course of the next week: Sister Lucy lived with a small, tight knot of fury at the center of her chest.

She raised her crooked hand. Suffering, she said, does not disguise a true nature. It only lays it bare.

Let him get up and get going, she prayed--avoiding his hand as it reached out from under the blankets he'd pulled over his head. Or, sometimes, giving in--she had done this, too--giving in to the luxury of what he wanted to believe: that their time belonged to themselves alone, that they could do as they pleased with it.

...that night she realized she wasn't old at all. You couldn't be old and still be wrong about as many things as she'd been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.

I have found that the most intimate relationships allow for a great deal of privacy within them.

There are people like you and like me. We have bad things happen to us, and we survive them. We are sturdy. But with people like your friend, you must be exceptionally gentle, or they may break.

So you learn, in your mind, that your body needs to be protected. It's both precious and totally dispensable, depending on whom you encounter.

Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid. Notparanoid, exactly, but always alert an aware, like checking out the exits in the movie theater or the fire escape in a hotel. Yo came to know, in a way you hadn't as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified.

Disgrace crept into our family and altered our dynamics so much that our previous life seemed like it happened to other people. Individuals once bound by blood and love morphed into strangers barely strung together by misfortune and circumstance.

It's like I made up a history. My memory doesn't support my frustrations. Not completely.

It rarely does. We make people what we need them to be so our feelings make sense. Everyone does it.

Try to move away from needing anyone to blame, Issac. That's our first default in western culture. Just assemble the pieces and let the story speak for itself. You don't need a hero. Or a villain. Just a complete story.

I'd not wanted to give dad credit for anything artistic in me, but seems I had no choice.

I suppose this is the way of trauma. We file hurt and pain away in dark parts of our soul, never knowing it finds its way out, disguised as something else altogether. We protect it with silence, but we don't heal it that way. We simply hand it to the next generation.

I almost don't finish this when I began to suspect that the book is an undeclared parable. I persisted, and am better for it.

All the things around him, the bed linens and hot water and light switches and radiators, are part of an elaborately constructed, pleasantly convincing, utterly inane illusion of safety, of consequence.

It was a simple thing, in the end, to begin.
Marian Graves

After Caleb leaves, Marian is lonely for the first time since coming to Alaska. The uninhabited ring of space she's cultivated around herself begins to seem less like a protective barrier than scorched earth.

The responsibility of owning so many fine and delicate positions, so Mary sparkling bits and bobs that served no real purpose but must not be forgotten or lost or broken, worked on her like a kind of drag, slowing her. She was unused to shoes that must not be gotten wet and gossamer fabrics that snagged or stretched unless she remembered to move cautiously at all times.

She sighed and patted his forearm. "You've had to take care of each other more than most children and grow up quickly. It must have been very hard sometimes.
When he was safely in the attic, he sat on the floor and wept. He had not known how badly he had wanted someone to say exactly that.

In her experience, proximity to other humans did not actually diminish solitude.

Ernest: "that's called nostalgia"
Lisavet: "it's called misremembering. It's not the truth." I don't want to just remember things. I want to know what really happened. I want to know what it was like to actually be there. And the only way to do that is to see everything. Everybody's version of reality.

That's the problem though isn't it? People don't remember things the same way. Is it even possible for us to remember something as it truly happened? A memory, once it's over, is never exactly what it was when it was happening. Whatever comes later changes the meaning of it.

Time can wash dirt off of a memory until it is revealed as something g else entirely.

Ryan clicks his tongue. "Yikes, science. Can't help you there". Like he has ever helped with her homework. How can he say and so such normal things when he's said and done such awful ones?

Much of marriage is some permutation of mismatched desires, like a three-legged race. And desires become indistinguishable. But if perfect understanding of our motives were a prerequisite to action, the world would be motionless.

It follows that an order of nuns who named their school the Immaculate Conception Convent should be violently opposed to sex outside marriage, and quite possibly within it. Sister Ignatius has demonized it enough over the years that we are predestined with to develop life-long sexual hang-ups, or--as in the case of my sister--set upon a trail of wild promiscuity the moment we are set free.

I'm listless and pacing, churned up with feelings I won't t allow to become thoughts. It's the boy mostly. The grip of his hand. I'd forgotten how young children, much like animals, can sense your pain without being afraid of it.

It's strange, the patchwork stories we tell someone when we want them to catch up, a shortcut to knowing is, as if such a thing were possible.

Most of her feels numb. Expose the mind repeatedly to the same trauma, again and again and again, and it will learn to protect itself by normalizing the extraordinary.

The world is careless with nice people. Diamond