Part 1 Quotes

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once. (Stephen to Elaine) Chapter 1

You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away. (Elaine) Chapter 1

There is no one I would ever tell this to, except Cordelia. But which Cordelia? The one I have conjured up, the one with the rolltop boots and the turned-up collar, or the one before, or the one after? There is never only one, of anyone. (Elaine) Chapter 2

I’ve started to chew my fingers again. There’s blood, a taste I remember. (Elaine) Chapter 2

Part 2 Quotes

This is the middle of my life. I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I’m supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I’m supposed to be a person of substance. But since coming back here I don’t feel weightier. I feel lighter, as if I’m shedding matter, losing molecules, calcium from my bones, cells from my blood; as if I’m shrinking, as if I’m filling with cold air, or gently falling snow. (Elaine) Chapter 3

Alongside my real life I have a career, which may not qualify as exactly real. I am a painter. (Elaine) Chapter 3

Then, suddenly, I feel wonder. I have achieved, finally, a face that a moustache can be drawn on, a face that attracts moustaches. A public face, a face worth defacing. This is an accomplishment. I have made something of myself, something or other, after all. I wonder if Cordelia will see this poster. (Elaine) Chapter 3

‘You can’t fly on one wing.’ So in fact the prayer in the song is useless. (Elaine) Chapter 4

I want some friends, friends who will be girls. Girl friends. I know that these exist, having read about them in books, but I’ve never had any girl friends because I’ve never been in one place long enough. (Elaine) Chapter 5

Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly. (Elaine) Chapter 7

Part 3 Quotes

There are days when I can hardly make it out of bed. I find it an effort to speak. I measure progress in steps, the next one and the next one, as far as the bathroom. These steps are major accomplishments. (Elaine) Chapter 8

I bring my shoeless foot down hard on the wrist. There’s a shriek, some loud plural giggling: youth on the fast track, schoolgirls on the prowl. My wallet is dropped, the hand shoots back like a tentacle. I jerk open the door. Damn you, Cordelia! I think.
But Cordelia is long gone. (Elaine) Chapter 8

I am very curious about the BOYS door. How is going in through a door different if you’re a boy? (Elaine) Chapter 9

I know the unspoken rules of boys, but with girls I sense that I am always on the verge of some unforeseen, calamitous blunder. (Elaine) Chapter 9

Carol asks me what church I go to, and I say I don’t know. In fact we never go to church. (Elaine) Chapter 9

‘Ew,’ says Carol, screwing up her face and wriggling all over. I can’t pretend to be shocked and disgusted too: my brother wouldn’t be convinced. (Elaine) Chapter 10

I see that there’s a whole world of girls and their doings that has been unknown to me, and that I can be part of it without making any effort at all. (Elaine) Chapter 10

The cat’s eyes are my favorites. If I win a new one I wait until I’m by myself, then take it out and examine it, turning it over and over in the light. The cat’s eyes really are like eyes, but not the eyes of cats. They’re the eyes of something that isn’t known but exists anyway; like the green eye of the radio; like the eyes of aliens from a distant planet. My favorite one is blue. I put it into my red plastic purse to keep it safe. I risk my other cat’s eyes to be shot at, but not this one. (Elaine) Chapter 10

She smiles a lot, with her lips closed over her large teeth; but, like Grace, she does not laugh. (Elaine about Mrs Smeath) Chapter 11

‘Remember this,’ our father says. ‘This is a classic infestation. You won’t see an infestation like this again for a long time.’ It’s the way I’ve heard people talk about forest fires, or the war: respect and wonderment mixed in with the sense of catastrophe. (Elaine) Chapter 13

Grace and Carol are standing among the apple trees, just where I left them. But they don’t look the same. They don’t look at all like the pictures of them I’ve carried around in my head for the past four months, shifting pictures in which only a few features stand out… A third girl is with them. (Elaine) Chapter 13

This is what Mummie says when she’s angry: ‘I am disappointed in you.’ If she gets very disappointed, Cordelia’s father will be called into it, and that is serious. None of the girls jokes or drawls when mentioning him. (About Cordelia’s family) Chapter 14

Part 4 Quotes

I don’t look at this painting for very long, or at any of them. If I do I’ll start finding things wrong with them. I’ll want to take an Exacto knife to them… (Elaine) Chapter 16

‘The war. There are people who remember the war and people who don’t. There’s a cut-off point, there’s a difference.’ (Elaine) Chapter 16

‘So you don’t feel it’s sort of demeaning to be propped up by a man?’ she says.
‘Women prop up men all the time,” I say. “What’s wrong with a little reverse propping?’
(Andrea to Elaine – interview) Chapter 16

‘Every educated person should know the Bible,’ he says. (Mr Risley) Chapter 18

God is not an entirely new idea for me: they have him at school in the morning prayers, and even in ‘God Save the King’. But it seems there is more to it… (Elaine) Chapter 18

Each cluster of girls excludes some other girls, but all boys. (Elaine) Chapter 19

When I was put into the hole I knew it was a game; now I know it is not one. I feel sadness, a sense of betrayal. Then I feel the darkness pressing down on me; then terror. (Elaine) Chapter 20

Part 5 Quotes

Your elbows, especially your elbows: aging begins at the elbows and metastasizes. This is religion. Voodoo and spells. I want to believe in it, the creams, the rejuvenating lotions, the transparent unguents in vials that slick on like roll-top glue. (Elaine) Chapter 21

In the endless time when Cordelia had such power over me, I peeled the skin off my feet. I did it at night, when I was supposed to be sleeping. (Elaine) Chapter 21

With sons I would have known what to do: frog catching, fishing, war strategies, running around in the mud. … But the world of sons has changed; it’s more likely to be the boys now with that baffled look, like a night dweller gone blind in sunlight. ‘Stand up for yourself like a man,’ I would have said. I would have been on shifty ground.
As for the girls, my girls at any rate, they seem to have been born with some kind of protective coating, some immunity I lacked. (Elaine) Chapter 21

Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence, but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized. (Elaine) Chapter 22

They are my friends, my girl friends, my best friends. I have never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please. Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love. (Elaine) Chapter 22

I want to believe you should love your neighbors as yourself and the Kingdom of God is within you. But all of this seems less and less possible. (Elaine) Chapter 23

He’s polite and ill at ease and he giggles frequently, looking with what I sense is terror at the array of food spread out before him, the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the lurid green and red Jell-O salad, the enormous turkey: my mother has said that the food is different there. I know he’s miserable, underneath his smiles and politeness. I’m developing a knack for this, I can sniff out hidden misery in others now with hardly any effort at all. (About Mr Banerji) Chapter 24

‘There are no limits to human greed,’ says my father. (Elaine) Chapter 24

‘Fooling with Nature, sir,’ says Mr Banerji. I know already that this is the right response. Investigating Nature is one thing and so is defending yourself against it, within limits, but fooling with it is quite another. (Elaine) Chapter 24

She’s not like any mother I’ve ever seen. (Elaine about Mrs Finestein) Chapter 25

‘Jews are kikes,’ says Carol, glancing at Cordelia for approval. (Carol) Chapter 25

‘Honey, that’s all right,’ she says, looking into my raw, watery eyes. She puts her arm around me and gives me a hug and an extra nickel. No one has ever called me honey before this. I go home, knowing I have failed her, and also myself. (Elaine with Mrs Finestein) Chapter 25

I see that there will be no end to imperfection, or to doing things the wrong way. Even if you grow up, no matter how hard you scrub, whatever you do, there will always be some other stain or spot on your face or stupid act, somebody frowning. (Elaine reflecting on women in magazines) Chapter 26

Part 6 Quotes

What would I have done if I had been my mother? She must have realized what was happening to me, or that something was. Even toward the beginning she must have noted my silences, my bitten fingers, the dark scabs on my lips where I’d pulled off patches of the skin. (Elaine) Chapter 28

Other people thought it was about female slavery, others that it was a stereotyping of women in negative and trivial domestic roles. But it was only my mother cooking, in the ways and places she used to cook, in the late forties. (About Elaine’s paintings of her mother) Chapter 28

I made this right after she died. I suppose I wanted to bring her back to life. I suppose I wanted her timeless, though there is no such thing on earth. These pictures of her, like everything else, are drenched in time. (Elaine about the painting of her mother) Chapter 28

I’m a fool, to confuse this with goodness. I am not good.
I know too much to be good. I know myself.
I know myself to be vengeful, greedy, secretive and sly. (Elaine, after helping the drunk lady) Chapter 28

I keep my cat’s eye in my pocket, where I can hold on to it. It rests in my hand, valuable as a jewel, looking out through bone and cloth with its impartial gaze. (Elaine) Chapter 29

I think about becoming invisible. I think about eating the deadly nightshade berries from the bushes beside the path. I think about drinking the Javex out of the skull and crossbones bottle in the laundry room, about jumping off the bridge, smashing down there like a pumpkin, half of an eye, half of a grin. I would come apart like that, I would be dead, like the dead people.
I don’t want to do these things, I’m afraid of them. But I think about Cordelia telling me to do them, not in her scornful voice, in her kind one. I hear her kind voice inside my head. Do it. (Elaine) Chapter 29

All fathers except mine are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye. And so we believe the belt. (Elaine) Chapter 32

I’m beginning to feel that I’ve discovered something worth knowing. There’s a way out of places you want to leave, but can’t. Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time. When you wake up it’s later. Time has gone on without you. (Elaine) Chapter 32

Part 7 Quotes

‘What can you expect, with that family?’ says Mrs Smeath. She doesn’t go on to say what’s wrong with my family. ‘The other children sense it. They know.’
‘You don’t think they’re being too hard on her?’ says Aunt Mildred. Her voice is relishing. She wants to know how hard.
‘It’s God’s punishment,’ says Mrs. Smeath. ‘It serves her right.’ (Aunt Mildred and Mrs Smeath about Elaine) Chapter 33

Her bad heart floats in her body like an eye, an evil eye, it sees me. (Elaine about Mrs Smeath) Chapter 33

I decide not to pray to God any more. When it’s time for the Lord’s Prayer I stand in silence, moving my lips only. (Elaine) Chapter 33

I can no longer pray to God so I will pray to the Virgin Mary instead. This decision makes me nervous, as if I’m about to steal. My heart beats harder, my hands feel cold. I feel I’m about to get caught. Kneeling seems called for. (Elaine) Chapter 34

I look at her. She wants me to go down into the ravine where the bad men are, where we’re never supposed to go. It occurs to me that I may not. What will she do then?
I can see this idea gathering in Cordelia as well. Maybe she’s gone too far, hit, finally, some core of resistance in me. If I refuse to do what she says this time, who knows where my defiance will end? (Elaine) Chapter 35

You can go home now, she says. It will be all right. Go home. I don’t hear the words out loud, but this is what she says. (Elaine’s vision in the ravine) Chapter 35

I know who it is that I’ve seen. It’s the Virgin Mary, there can be no doubt. Even when I was praying I wasn’t sure she was real, but now I know she is. Who else could walk on air like that, who else would have a glowing heart? (Elaine) Chapter 36

‘It fell over the bridge,’ I say. I need to get this lie over with as soon as possible. Telling the truth about Cordelia is still unthinkable for me. (Elaine) Chapter 36

‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ I say. I’m amazed at myself.
‘You’re being insolent,’ says Cordelia. ‘Wipe that smirk off your face.’
I am still a coward, still fearful; none of that has changed. But I turn and walk away from her. It’s like stepping off a cliff, believing the air will hold you up. And it does. I see that I don’t have to do what she says, and, worse and better, I’ve never had to do what she says. I can do what I like. (Elaine) Chapter 36

Part 8 Quotes

I could see what these were for: she was a Virgin of lost things, one who restored what was lost. (Elaine sees a statue in Mexico) Chapter 37

I’ve forgotten things, I’ve forgotten that I’ve forgotten them. I remember my old school, but only dimly, as if I was last there five years ago instead of five months. I remember going to Sunday school, but not the details. (Elaine) Chapter 38

Time is missing.
Nobody mentions anything about this missing time, except my mother. Once in a while she says, ‘That bad time you had,’ and I am puzzled. (Elaine) Chapter 38

I’m tired of having long wavy hair that has to be held back by barrettes or hairbands, I’m tired of being a child. I watch with satisfaction as my hair falls away from me like fog and my head emerges, sharper-featured, more clearly defined. (Elaine) Chapter 38

Seeing Cordelia, I realize that I don’t look like a teenager, I look like a kid dressed up as one. I am still thin, still flat. I have a ferocious desire to be older. (Elaine) Chapter 38

She knows the rituals, she knows how we’re supposed to be behaving, now that we’re in high school. But I think these things are impenetrable and fraudulent, and I can’t do them without feeling I’m acting. (Elaine about Cordelia) Chapter 39

A lot of the time my brother doesn’t seem aware of me. He’s thinking about other things, solemn things that are important. He sits at the dinner table, his right hand moving, pinching a breadcrust into pellets, staring at the wall behind my mother’s head, on which there is a picture of three milkweed pods in a vase, while my father explains why the human race is doomed. (Elaine about Stephen and her father) Chapter 39

‘Time is a dimension,’ he says. ‘You can’t separate it from space. Space-time is what we live in.’ He says there are no such things as discrete objects which remain unchanged, set apart from the flow of time. (Stephen to Elaine about time) Chapter 40

Part 9 Quotes

Eminent, the mausoleum word. I might as well climb onto the marble slab right now and pull the bedsheet over my head. (Elaine reading her review) Chapter 41

This is the only picture I ever did of Cordelia, Cordelia by herself. Half a Face, it’s called: an odd title, because Cordelia’s entire face is visible. But behind her, hanging on the wall, like emblems in the Renaissance, or those heads of animals, moose or bear, you used to find in northern bars, is another face, covered with a white cloth. The effect is of a theatrical mask. Perhaps. I had trouble with this picture. It was hard for me to fix Cordelia in one time, at one age. (Elaine) Chapter 41

Cordelia is afraid of me, in this picture.
I am afraid of Cordelia.
I’m not afraid of seeing Cordelia. I’m afraid of being Cordelia. Because in some way we changed places, and I’ve forgotten when. (Elaine) Chapter 41

Cordelia wants to point out Lump-lump Family cars, but I’m tired of this. I have a denser, more malevolent little triumph to finger: energy has passed between us, and I am stronger. (Elaine) Chapter 42

I have such a mean mouth that I become known for it. I don’t use it unless provoked, but then I open my mean mouth and short, devastating comments come out of it. (Elaine) Chapter 43

It’s as if this girl has done something shameful, herself, by being murdered. So she goes to that place where all things go that are not mentionable, taking her blond hair, her angora sweater, her ordinariness with her. (Elaine) Chapter 44

But when Cordelia’s father is there, everything is different. (Elaine) Chapter 44

‘Just safe,’ she says. ‘When I was really little, I guess I used to get into trouble a lot, with Daddy. When he would lose his temper. You never knew when he was going to do it.’ (Cordelia about her father) Chapter 45

Cordelia’s face dissolves, re-forms: I can see her nine-year-old face taking shape beneath it. This happens in an eyeblink. It’s as if I’ve been standing outside in the dark and a shade has snapped up, over a lighted window, revealing the life that’s been going on inside in all its clarity and detail. There is that glimpse, during which I can see. And then not. (Elaine) Chapter 45

I know she has expected something from me, some connection to her old life, or to herself. I know I have failed to provide it. I am dismayed by myself, by my cruelty and indifference, my lack of kindness. But also I feel relief. (Elaine) Chapter 46

Part 10 Quotes

There are several diseases of the memory. Forgetfulness of nouns, for instance, or of numbers. Or there are more complex amnesias. (Elaine) Chapter 47

I look at him with the nostalgic affection men are said to feel for their wars, their fellow veterans. I think, I once threw things at this man. (Elaine about Jon) Chapter 47

Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women. (Elaine) Chapter 47

His view of life has darkened since Mr Banerji returned to India. There is some obscurity around this: it is not talked of much. My mother says he was homesick, and hints at a nervous breakdown, but there was more to it than that. ‘They wouldn’t promote him,’ says my father. There’s a lot behind they (not we ), and wouldn’t (not didn’t). ‘He wasn’t properly appreciated.’ I think I know what this means. (Mr Risley to Elaine about Mr Banerji) Chapter 52

And I no longer know who’s writing. I think of him as staying always the same, but of course this can’t be true. He must know things by now that he didn’t know before, as I do. (Elaine about Stephen) Chapter 52

‘Don’t leave me,’ he says, running his hands over me; always before, not after. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’ This is an old-fashioned thing to say, and in another man I would find it comical, but not in Josef. I am in love with his need. (Elaine about Mr Hrbik) Chapter 53

‘I have no country,’ says Josef mournfully. He touches my cheek tenderly, gazing into my eyes. ‘You are my country now.’ (Mr Hrbik) Chapter 53

I remember my mean mouth, I remember how wise I thought I was. But I was not wise then. Now I am wise. (Elaine) Chapter 54

I watch for Cordelia, and when Prospero’s attendants come on, with music and jittery lighting effects, I peer hard, trying to see which one she is, behind the disguise of costume. But I can’t tell. (Elaine) Chapter 54

Josef is rearranging me. (Elaine) Chapter 55

‘Would you do anything for me?’ he says, gazing into my eyes. I sway toward him, far away from the earth. Yes would be so easy.
‘No,’ I say. This is a surprise to me. I don’t know where it has come from, this unexpected and stubborn truthfulness. It sounds rude. (Elaine) Chapter 55

Part 11 Quotes

‘Please,’ she says. ‘They are killing many people.’ She doesn’t say where. It could be a lot of places, or in between places; homelessness is a nationality now. Somehow the war never ended after all, it just broke up into pieces and got scattered, it gets in everywhere, you can’t shut it out. Killing is endless now, it’s an industry, there’s money in it, and the good side and the bad side are pretty hard to tell apart.
‘Yes,’ I say. This is the war that killed Stephen. (A Middle Eastern woman and Elaine) Chapter 56

As for Jon, I know what he offers. He offers escape, running away from the grown-ups. He offers fun, and mess. He offers mischief. (Elaine) Chapter 57

I ride to the hospital with Susie, in the back of the ambulance. She is now semiconscious, and I hold her hand, which is cold and small. ‘Don’t tell Josef,’ she whispers to me. The pink nightie brings it home to me: she is none of the things I’ve thought about her, she never has been. (Elaine) Chapter 57

But there is also another voice; a small, mean voice, ancient and smug, that comes from somewhere deep inside my head: It serves her right. (Elaine about Susie) Chapter 57

He says Toronto is getting overpopulated, and also polluted. He says the lower Great Lakes are the world’s largest sewer and that if we knew what was going into the drinking water we would all become alcoholics. As for the air, it’s so full of chemicals we should be wearing gas masks. (Elaine about Mr Risley) Chapter 58

He has a look of amazing brilliance, as if at any minute his head will light up and become transparent, disclosing a huge brightly colored brain inside. At the same time he looks rumpled and bewildered, as if he’s just wakened from a pleasant dream to find himself surrounded by Munchkins. (Elaine about Stephen) Chapter 59

Jon comes over, eats, sleeps, and goes away. I watch him with detachment; he notices nothing. Every move I make is sodden with unreality. When no one is around, I bite my fingers. I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life. My body is a separate thing. It ticks like a clock; time is inside it. It has betrayed me, and I am disgusted with it. (Elaine) Chapter 60

I have no doubt that all of these things are true. Rapists exist, and those who molest children and strangle girls. They exist in the shadows, like the sinister men who lurk in ravines, not one of whom I have ever seen. They are violent, wage wars, commit murders. They do less work and make more money. They shove the housework off on women…. But I am on shaky ground, in this testifying against men, because I live with one. (Elaine in the feminist meeting) Chapter 61

They all seem to have more friends than I do, more close women friends. I’ve never really considered it before, this absence; I’ve assumed that other women were like me. They were, once. And now they are not.
There is Cordelia, of course. But I haven’t seen her for years. (Elaine) Chapter 62

It takes me a moment to recognize Cordelia, because she doesn’t look at all the same. Or rather she doesn’t look the way she did when I last saw her, in her wide cotton skirt and barbaric bracelet, elegant and confident. She is in an earlier phase, or a later one: the soft green tweeds and tailored blouses of her good-taste background, which now appear matronly on her, because she has put on weight. Or has she? (Elaine meeting Cordelia) Chapter 63

‘I can’t, Cordelia,’ I say gently. But I don’t feel gentle toward her. I am seething, with a fury I can neither explain nor express. How dare you ask me? (Elaine meeting Cordelia) Chapter 63

I imitate relief. I feel free, and weightless.
But I am not free, of Cordelia. (Elaine) Chapter 63

Part 12 Quotes

The past isn’t quaint while you’re in it. Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as decor, not as the shape your life’s been squeezed into. (Elaine) Chapter 64

Young women need unfairness, it’s one of their few defenses. They need their callousness, they need their ignorance. (Elaine) Chapter 64

I don’t feel I’m being disloyal to Ben, only loyal to something else; which predates him, which has nothing to do with him. An old score. (Elaine with Jon) Chapter 64

I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can’t even see it, something that’s drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead. (Elaine) Chapter 65

I’ve already decided what I will do, afterward, tomorrow. I’ll wear my arm in a sling and say I broke my wrist. So I don’t have to tell him, or Jon, or anyone else, about the voice. I know it wasn’t really there. Also I know I heard it. (Elaine) Chapter 65

I’m good at leaving. The trick is to close yourself off. Don’t hear, don’t see. Don’t look back. (Elaine) Chapter 66

Ben considers me good, and I don’t disturb this faith: he doesn’t need my more unsavory truths. He considers me also a little fragile, because artistic: I need to be cared for, like a potted plant. I’m good at leaving. The trick is to close yourself off. Don’t hear, don’t see. Don’t look back. (Elaine) Chapter 66

Part 13 Quotes

M y brother Stephen died five years ago. I shouldn’t say died: was killed. I try not to think of it as murder, although it was, but as some kind of accident, like an exploding train. Or else a natural catastrophe, like a landslide. What they call for insurance purposes an act of God. (Elaine) Chapter 68

They’re like those characters in old comic books, the ones with two identities. These men have been caught halfway through their transformation: ordinary bodies but with powerful, supernatural heads, deformed in the direction of heroism, or villainy. I don’t know whether or not this is what my brother thought. But it’s what I think for him, now. (Elaine thinking for Stephen on the plane) Chapter 68

Then he is falling, faster than the speed of light. This is how my brother enters the past. (Elaine thinking for Stephen on the plane) Chapter 68

‘Those girls gave you a bad time,’ she says one day. I’ve made both or us a cup of tea—she’s permitted this—and we sit at the kitchen table, drinking it. (Mrs Risley to Elaine) Chapter 69

‘A marble!’ says my mother, with a child’s delight. ‘Remember all those marbles Stephen used to collect?’
‘Yes,’ I say. But this one was mine.
I look into it, and see my life entire. (Elaine) Chapter 69

Part 14 Quotes

I was unbaptized, a nest for demons: how could she know what germs of blasphemy and unfaith were breeding in me? And yet she took me in. Some of this must be true. I have not done it justice, or rather mercy. Instead I went for vengeance. An eye for an eye leads only to more blindness. (Elaine about Mrs Smeath) Chapter 71

Who knows what death camp ashes blew daily through the head of Mrs Finestein, in those years right after the war? Mr Banerji probably could not walk down a street here without dread, of a shove or some word whispered or shouted. Miss Stuart was in exile, from plundered Scotland still declining, three thousand miles away. To them I was incidental, their kindness to me casual and minor; I’m sure they didn’t give it a second thought, or have any idea of what it meant. (Elaine, Three Muses) Chapter 71

I think about escaping, out the back way. I could send a telegram later, claiming illness. (Elaine) Chapter 72

Really it’s Cordelia I expect, Cordelia I want to see. There are things I need to ask her. Not what happened, back then in the time I lost, because now I know that. I need to ask her why. If she remembers. (Elaine) Chapter 72

You’re dead, Cordelia.
No I’m not.
Yes you are. You’re dead.
Lie down. (Elaine) Chapter 73

Part 15 Quotes

I know she’s looking at me, the lopsided mouth smiling a little, the face closed and defiant. There is the same shame, the sick feeling in my body, the same knowledge of my own wrongness, awkwardness, weakness; the same wish to be loved; the same loneliness; the same fear. But these are not my own emotions any more. They are Cordelia’s; as they always were.
I am the older one now, I’m the stronger. If she stays here any longer she will freeze to death; she will be left behind, in the wrong time. It’s almost too late.
I reach out my arms to her, bend down, hands open to show I have no weapon. It’s all right, I say to her. You can go home now. (Elaine) Chapter 74

This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea. (Elaine) Chapter 74

If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of years ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing. It’s old light, and there’s not much of it. But it’s enough to see by. (Elaine) Chapter 74