When Rabbit Howls Quotes
"Being strong is great, but you’ve got to learn to ask for help. Asking for help is a sign of health."
"It’s impossible for me to believe that she knew what was going on."
"I don’t have what you’d call constant contact with anyone. Never have. Don’t want to."
"Everything seemed like messages from my own mind."
"I was so sure I had everything under control the other day but I went on appointments, grocery shopped, all with a silly, sixteen-year-old smile on my face. When I caught sight of myself in the mirror, I looked different, gleeful. I was warm with people all day, caring, ridiculous."
"My mother said hoop earrings, makeup, and shorts denoted looseness. I don’t know why I’m wearing them today or the clothes, either. They make me feel uncomfortable. As if wearing them makes me bad."
"I always felt it was dumb, but that’s what the mother said. See this lipstick we’re wearing? Pale, isn’t it? Bright lipstick scares some of us."
"I tried to run away. There were transient workers on the next farm. They laughed a lot, I could hear them when the wind was right."
"The mother would sit with her feet in the water, leaning down into the crates of fruit, bent over in that awful position. She did it to feed us, give us Christmas presents."
"I wanted to get up from the bed and go to the bathroom, but an odd force pinned me next to Morgan. The voices became relentless."
"I can’t eat canned peaches or apple sauce anymore. I still see her sitting there... summer dusk in upper New York State could be very cold, especially when it rained."
"The idea of being part of any family, in view of the one I’d grown up in, was anathema to her. For all Catherine’s sophistication, she could not control her ire."
"It was ugly. And that other one came out and smiled into the mirror like she’d done a bad thing and didn’t care. When you do bad things you’ve got to care."
"I feel like a lunatic. How can I go out in public this way?"
"Her own good. Her mother had said that to her constantly, and he knew the revulsion it summoned up."
"The human animal in my estimation is beyond redemption and to spend forty hours a week treating that irredeemability is perfectly ridiculous."
"I wanted, actually wanted, to be a therapist when I signed up for this course. I must have been mad."
"Right now, what bothers me most is the pink thing in the flicks. It’s there with all that wiry brush around it and it seems to pertain to me, and yet it doesn’t."
"I’m trying to tell you the obscene first; I figure that way the rest will be easy. Like the vegetables we hate. Eat the shit first, right?"
"He grinned and he stood there, and he didn’t lift a finger. How did I know what he was thinking so clearly, and why can’t I remember it?"
"Children are capable of sexual arousal from birth, and if someone else is instructing and encouraging as your stepfather was, the need to masturbate can become an obsession."
"I knew that if he got his hands on any one of us, he’d choke us until we had no more breath."
"She wasn’t mature, wasn’t a businesswoman but something else entirely."
"It’s a cold world out there. What are you crying for, keep that up and I’ll give you something to cry about!"
"My stepfather looked on mealtime as a battleground."
"Multiples are good at hiding. Some could hide in the middle of main street, name tag and all, and nobody would find them."
"I’ve only had time to read fifty percent of what you’ve got in that box. My schedule is worse than ever and, outside of the sessions and for a few days afterward when I’m energised, I’m exhausted."
"It’s like an underground movement, isn’t it? I’ve never met Jeannie but she’s more real to me than I am."
"No matter how bad things were as a child, it was always possible to hang in there until the next day, the next year."
"I hate this life. I hate everything. Ask me what I don’t hate. It might be easier for me to tell you what I don’t hate."
"All of it seemed normal to me, the way we lived. They were right and I was wrong."
"She thinks she’s crazy. I wish you were in town with me on this one."
"Sometimes when it rained, the door from the cellar on the side of the house would be left open. Occasionally a raindrop would hit the spider webs and fascinate her all over again. All the colors dancing in a tiny raindrop, caught undisturbed for a moment."
"Right after a rainstorm, the mother duck and her four young ones trooped in a loud formation past the cellar door at the side of the house, snatching drinks from the puddles as they went."
"The confetti grew in volume and gathered momentum; it became a hailstorm, and each tiny shred made that flicking sensation against her mind."
"Somewhere in the back of her brain she must have known all along that there had been pleasure along with the pain."
"She herself was the whore the stepfather had called her in the kitchen that day. This was what he smirked at all those years."
"The smell of her mother’s body was back, along with the overpowering desire for tea. Hot tea with cream fresh from a cow and two teaspoons of sugar, a bowl of tomato soup, and a bologna sandwich, fat with butter and Hellmann’s mayonnaise, with all the crust trimmed off."
"The woman wanted to put her two hands between her legs and tear the offending flesh away. Kill it, too."
"The woman didn’t understand how she drove to Page’s house and back, or how she kept the smile on her face."
"The woman sat there in the gallery, little more than a baby; she dared to peer into the flick no longer."
"For now, in lieu of a whole weekend’s solitude, the woman pulled into the 7-Eleven parking lot."
"Is it true? Could the stepfather really have done that?"
"My anger toward everything had risen to such a pitch, I was so afraid it would rub off on you."
"I can’t stand it. I want to know if what’s happening to me is normal. Am I normal?"
"I hate you for treating me like a child! There’s a secret here that someone isn’t telling me!"
"It’s only a question of time. It won’t be long now. Eventually, I’ll get you."
"Incest leaves the victim with no real connection to him- or herself or anyone else."
"Incest is a thief; it steals more from its victims than you can ever imagine. Make no mistake—by whatever pretense—incest, child abuse, stinks out loud."
"I’ve got to be out of my mind with fright every day."
"That’s a qualifying statement if I ever heard one."
"Legacies are handed down, but one does not have to accept them."
"We cooperated long enough, all of us, to bring the whole thing together without killing each other. Can you imagine that?"
"Don’t you dare be scared. It will only take a second and don’t you make a sound. Not one."
"They didn’t grow up on the Muppets and Star Wars. They grew up playing a very real game. By adult rules."