Sally Grace’s Reviews > When Women Were Dragons > Status Update

“If I had known how this story would end, would I have done anything differently? Would I still have loved her, body and soul?
In my mind's eye, I can see Camilla asking me that very question.
Oh, my darling, I feel my heart answer. I wouldn't change a single
thing.”

“Sometimes, I feel that we are all tricked by love, and its rigid requirement of pain.
We find the love of our lives and cleave to our beloved when we are still quite young and do not yet understand that we must, by our nature, die someday. In any successful marriage, one partner must face the reality of being very old, and very alone. What is grief, but love that's lost its object?”

“I began to make plans for what my future might be—what once felt like a mad dash to the end of a cliff now felt like an interesting path in a beautiful wood that may or may not lead to the top of a mountain. And yes, the chances of my arrival at that destination were uncertain, but oh! What a mountain! And oh!
What a view! And what a pleasure it was to keep moving forward.”

“I found myself in all moments at once, past and present and worrying future, the threads of time and space looping through my experience, intersecting with one another, forming a knot at the center of myself, where each touched each-each place, each moment, each heartbeat, each discrete unit of time, each twist in the thread of my life.”

“Where did it come from, this anger? I wasn't raised to be an angry
person.
And yet.”

“Maybe all those things are true, and every other characterization I have for him that is ... more obvious and less kind... perhaps those are true as well. And maybe this is the same with all of us—our best selves and our worst selves and our myriad iterations of mediocte selves are all extant simultaneously within a soul containing multitudes.”

“You will tell people that you did not raise me to be an angry woman, and that statement will be correct. I was never allowed to be angry, was I? My ability to discover and understand the power of my own raging was a thing denied to me. Until, at last, I learned to stop denying myself.”