Цитаты из аудиокниги «История твоей жизни (сборник)», страница 3

Я взяла со стола увесистую папку и демонстративно встряхнула: это было выданное лингвистам пособие по ликвидации физической безграмотности...

— Вы родили меня лишь для того, чтобы обзавестись бесплатной прислугой! — горько заявишь ты, выволакивая из кладовки пылесос.

— Ты права, — соглашусь я. — Еще тринадцать лет назад я знала, что сегодня надо будет вычистить ковры. И решила, что самый лучший и дешевый способ выполнить эту работу — родить ребенка. Поэтому принимайся за дело и не медли.

— Жаль, что ты моя мать, а то бы тебя привлекли за эксплуатацию детского труда, — сердито пробурчишь ты, разматывая шнур и вставляя вилку в розетку.

Of course beauty has been used as a tool of oppression, but eliminating beauty is not the answer; you can't liberate people by narrowing the scope of their experiences. That's positively Orwellian. What's needed is a woman-centered concept of beauty, one that lets all women feel good about themselves instead of making most of them feel bad.

Brain damage is never a good idea, no matter what your friends say.

For people like him, Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that. And since God hadn't previously played a role in Neil's life, he wasn't afraid of being exiled from God. The prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him.

I've tried that myself: ignoring the government, seeing if it would go away. It hasn't.

It's amazing the diverse situations in which you can bring up the divorce.

God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful, and understanding that is essential to true devotion.

Neil became actively resentful of God. Sarah had been the greatest blessing of his life, and God had taken her away. Now he was expected to love Him for it? For Neil, it was like having a kidnapper demand love as ransom for his wife's return. Obedience he might have managed, but sincere, heart-felt love? That was a ransom he couldn't pay.

It'll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself.