Vox Quotes
"You’re the cognitive linguist," Patrick says, gathering empty plates, urging Steven to do the same. "Was." "Are.""
"Tonight, let it be all quiet. Full silence. A void."
"Because, after all, none of the crap they’ve hit us with has anything to do with speaking."
"You can take a lot away from a person—money, job, intellectual stimulation, whatever. You can take her words, even, without changing the essence of her. Take away camaraderie, though, and we’re talking about something different."
"I watched them stare in horror as three uniformed men approached, I watched the pyramid of oranges tumble when the women tried to resist, and I watched them being led out of the automatic doors, them and their baby girls, each of the four with a wide metal cuff on her wrist."
"I haven’t inquired after them, of course. But I don’t have to. I’ve never seen those women or their babies since."
"Our postman’s truck stops at the corner and he gets out, swathed in one of those clear plastic raincoats the post office issues for inclement weather. He looks like he’s wearing a condom."
"In other times, this constant supervision of the first lady would be accepted as routine security for her protection. The truth, however, is in Anna Myers’ blue eyes; they have the vacant, lusterless quality of a woman who now sees the world in shades of gray."
"If you want to know what depression looks like, all you need to do is look into a depressed person’s eyes."
"We still have cable, more than one hundred choices of sports, garden shows, cooking demos, home restoration, cartoons for the children, some movies. All the movies are PG—no horror, a smattering of light comedy, those four-hour epics about Moses and Jesus."
"I think it might have been that moment when I started hating my husband."
"They might need me, but need is different from want. And I don’t trust any of these men."
"We don’t have female postal workers anymore. I suppose that’s an enormous change."
"The chance to correct his tense is too good to miss. "Was," I say. "I don’t need to tell you I haven’t worked for the past year."
"You know, babe, I wonder if it was better when you didn’t talk."
"I suppose that’s what they’ve grown used to."
"I envy my only daughter; she has no recall of life before quotas or school days before the Pure Movement took off."
"It’s everything I can do to keep from cursing the men who made these, or the marketers and their sinister efforts to persuade us we have any kind of choice."
"I don’t hate my son. I don’t hate my son. I don’t hate my son."
"There’s no way I can win, but there’s a way I can feel like a winner."
"The only things I have to do are pay taxes and die."
"I’m sorry, Dr. McClellan, but I can’t do that."
"Tomorrow, I’ve already decided, it’s going to be steak. A mountain of steak."
"Someone should take away my mothering license."
"You’re not getting married at eighteen, kiddo."
"We need to do something, Jean. Something besides working on the Wernicke project."
"Be careful, honey. You’ve got a lot more to lose than your voice."
"I’ve always been a textbook kind of a girl when it comes to anything brain related. Let the MDs fiddle with the practical stuff."
"You don’t set up a lab with twenty-five million dollars’ worth of apparatus in three days."
"Men come in two flavors, real men and sheep."
"If someone you knew—maybe even someone you really love—did a shitty thing, would you rat them out?"
"For every action, there’s an opposing and appropriate reaction."
"You can start small, Jeanie. Attend some rallies, hand out flyers, talk to a few people about issues."
"And just like now, they ain’t gonna be equal."
"Looks like you and me are in the same barrel of pickles, Jean."
"Honey, there’s always a resistance. Didn’t you go to college?"
"What I don’t say is: What if I don’t want this baby? I already know the answer."
"You need to get it in your head, Jean. You women aren’t dependable."
"It’s moments before either of us speaks. 'Is it mine?' he asks."
"I’ll never see my kids again, or Patrick, or Lorenzo."
"Despite the still, warm air inside, a chill runs up and down my arms, raising the flesh into a braille of goose bumps."
"And what exactly are they planning? Forced laryngectomies? Slicing out our tongues?"
"You have no idea what they said about her today."
"It gets worse. He went around the room, smiling, and he handed out a sheet of paper with the foulest garbage written on it."
"We don’t have it as bad as Winston Smith, but we do have cameras."
"No one could possibly monitor every household all the time—there isn’t enough manpower for constant surveillance; nevertheless, I’m careful."
"Develop, test, and mass-produce anti-Wernicke serum."
"I didn’t lock it. I didn’t think I needed to."
"Let’s say you’re a little unsteady this morning. No big deal."
"The very nature of three distinct teams duplicating one another’s work shouldn’t merit classified status."
"Our workforce wasn’t cut in half, only reassembled and redistributed."
"Monsters aren’t born, ever. They’re made, piece by piece and limb by limb."
"Mice don’t have the capacity for language, but we didn’t need them to."
"Think about it, Enzo. Project Anti-Wernicke, Project Wernicke, and Project Water Solubility."
"I have less than forty-eight hours to make what I know will be an irreversible decision."
"I never saw a man—or woman—die before that. Kinda sticks in your brain, you know?"
"When they come for me, it’s better if you don’t know anything."
"So this is what it’s like, having my own husband sanction my affair."
"All energy eventually gets absorbed, morphs into a different shape, changes state."
"Anything never covers the whole gamut of existence."
"Think about what you need to do to stay free."
"Beauty is as beauty does and crops of corn. So silly."
"These guys are time bombs with no set timer."
"Oh Christ." Every single man inside this complex is married, maybe has children. "Some incentive," I say.
"I said, 'No.' It’s a negative, Morgan. A denial to your request. The opposite of agreement."
"You gave me a working serum, Jean. I want another one."
"All right. Let me explain this in simple terms. We have an anti-Wernicke process. It works."
"No," I say. Morgan leans over until his nose almost touches mine. "Excuse me? I didn’t hear you."
"Caught," Reverend Carl says. "Caught in a place no man or boy should be."
"Stay close to the cages on your way through the chimp room," I call after him.
"Don’t forget to read your manifestos, girls," he says. There’s a nasty emphasis on "girls."
"Pick up car, get Sonia’s sippy cup. She’ll have a meltdown if she has to go to bed without it."
"Look, I’m no scientist or anything. I got a high school degree and some community college hours; then I joined up."
"Danny knew what ‘no’ meant by the time he was five months old. Before he was one, he could say ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’ and ‘Boo.’"
"So my question is what’s gonna happen to my own little girl if she doesn’t ever get to talk? Is she gonna turn out like that Genie woman? End up in some kinda home?"
"I need to make a call," I say. "To let my husband know I’m not coming home tonight."
"You’re married," I say. "Yes, ma’am. Two years this month." His mouth curls into an embarrassed smile.
"And don’t flirt too much. I’m the jealous type."
"With this quantity, Enzo, we’re taking about total contamination, flat-out disruption of"—I check the numbers against my data a second time—"of more than three-quarters of the superior temporal gyrus."
"Relax," he says. The word comes out like he’s talking underwater, but I can see the individual sounds."
"You’ll have some ringing in your ears for a while. Maybe an hour. It’ll get better, trust me."
"Forty-five caliber, Gianna. You blew a hole in him the size of Virginia."
"Trust me," Poe says. "Keep your heads down and—I don’t know—try to look tired until we get past security."
"Don’t you worry, honey. I’ll love you ’til you’re dead. Maybe a while after that."
"You never forget your firstborn, I guess. You don’t love them more, but the bond is different, primal."
"The meeting is held over breakfast, but to Patrick it must feel like the Last Supper, and he’s the Judas in the crowd, passing a poisoned cup."
"Life throws little ironies at us. So the fact that Morgan LeBron, the incompetent little shit I took care of only a few days ago, was the cause of Patrick’s death held less surprise than it might have."
"When your husband took that bullet, I swear he was smiling."