Here are a few quotes from her books.
“Both formality and dinner forgotten we sat on the floor of the little library, choosing. Sometimes Dr Portman read passages aloud and turned his own memories with their dark side to face the light. And it was late afternoon when, with a headache of happiness, I returned to the ward. And from that day I felt in myself a reserve of warmth from which I could help myself, like coal from the cellar on a winter’s day, if the snow came or if the frost fell in the night to blacken the flowers and wither the new fruit.”The floor of the little library - informal, intimate, forming connections with others by this shared experience.
Istina (the narrator in 'Faces in the Water') is obsessed by the way that the worst wards have a smell about them: "a temple where a mixture of loneliness and despair was burned in place of interest".
“Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.”
“For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make man agree to his own destruction.”At one point Istina's aunt gives her a present of a bag..
"That bag was like my final entry paper into the land of the lost people. I was no longer looking from the outside on the people of Four-Five-and-One [the ward where the worst cases were kept] and their frightening care for their slight store of possessions; I was now an established citizen with little hope of returning across the frontier; I was in the crazy world, separated now by more than locked doors and barred windows from the people who called themselves sane."And from 'Scented Gardens for the Blind',
“People dread silence because it is transparent; like clear water, which reveals every obstacle—the used, the dead, the drowned, silence reveals the cast-off words and thoughts dropped in to obscure its clear stream. And when people stare too close to silence they sometimes face their own reflections, their magnified shadows in the depths, and that frightens them. I know; I know.”
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