Lucky Quotes
"During the rape my eye caught something among the leaves and glass. A pink hair tie."
"I was shivering uncontrollably. It was cold out and the cold combined with the fear, with the exhaustion, made me shake from head to toe."
"I will think of her when I think of the pink hair tie."
"I made sounds, they were nothing, they were soft footfalls."
"My lips were cut. I bit down on them when he grabbed me from behind and covered my mouth."
"I hope that to say this hurt isn't necessary here."
"I'm so sorry," he said. "You're such a good girl, a good girl, like you said."
"It was the first thing from my old life that I recognized on the other side."
"You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful."
"I want to kill you with boots and guns and glass."
"I could stop calling you 'the rapist', and start calling you John or Luke or Paul."
"I picture you now, your fingers rubbing sleep from those live blind eyes, while I rise restlessly."
"I hated the hush-hush of hiding things from other people."
"I had been granted admission to a poetry workshop led by Tess Gallagher, and a fiction workshop led by Tobias Wolff."
"It was a harder sell. He was a man, and at the time men had to surprise me before I even so much as thought about trusting them."
"I was in the presence of something special; that ballad confirmed my choice to return."
"I was back in school. I had classes to attend."
"I needed all my energy to focus on believing I was not under his control again."
"That's the man who raped me!" That happens in movies.
"Memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized."
"I've decided it is like a broken leg and like a broken leg, it will heal."
"Rape means to inhabit and destroy everything."
"I was a rape victim; how would I interpret his touch?"
"I had not lost my virginity, it was taken from me."
"The difference between sex and violence will be very clear to me."
"I realized even then that he'd been drunk during so many of these encounters."
"Snow built up on either side of them and formed a white widow's peak in the middle of the windshield."
"I was going home with a normal man—by most standards an attractive one—and he was taking me there to make love to me."
"I stood in the hallway between the darkened kitchen area and the unfurnished living area."
"His bedroom was near the bathroom. I knew that was where we were going, knew that was what I had come here for, but I hesitated."
"He was moving dirty laundry off the mattress on the floor of the bedroom."
"I held on. When he came, he came loudly and snorted and bellowed."
"I wept louder than I ever could have imagined. I shook with it."
"Of course, I did what he told me not to do. I fell in love with him."
"When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was."
"They do not have a normal 'baseline' level of alert but relaxed attention. Instead, they have an elevated baseline of arousal: their bodies are always on the alert for danger."
"Hell was over. I had all the time in the world ahead."
"It was almost virginal. Like you were having sex for the first time."
"I owe an endless thank-you to my mother. She has been my hero, my sparring partner, my inspiration, my spur."