alias grace

'Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word - musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.'

- Margaret Atwood

Alias Grace

(Page 25)

'My hair is coming out from under my cap. Red hair of an ogre. A wild beast, the newspaper said. A monster. When they come with my dinner I will put the slop bucket over my head and hide behind the door, and that will give them a fright. If they want a monster so badly they ought to be provided with one.

I never do such things, however. I only consider them. If I did them, they would be sure I had gone mad again. Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.'

- (Page 36-37)

'He'd quickly discovered at Guy's that he was no fond of blood.

But he'd learned some worthwhile lessons nonetheless. How easily people die, for one; how frequently, for another. A slip of the knife and you create an idiot. If this is so, why not the reverse? Could you sew and snip, and patch together a genius? What mysteries remain to be revealed in the nervous system, that web of structure both material and ethereal, that network of threads that runs throughout the body, composed of a thousand Ariadne's clues, all leading to the brain, that shadowy central den where the human bones lie scattered and the monsters lurk. . . .'

The angels also, he reminds himself. Also the angels.'

- (Page 217)

There's something truly disheartening about reading a novel and coming away having felt nothing much at all.

Especially from a writer you so admire.

Not that this is a bad book.

Far from it.

It just didn't cause me to 'feel' anything and that's something i require, even if it is the most unusual of feelings.

I really do think i'm getting dumber.

Soon i'll only be able to read The Hungry Caterpillar.

But that in itself is way existential.