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The Gilded Hour

Sara Donati

Top 10 Best Quotes

“There was nothing predictable in this life, and very little that was fair.”

“If this went on much longer, Mary Augustin told herself, her brain would be riddled with question marks, hundreds of little hooks set so deep they’d never let go.”

“But what she wanted to do was slip between cool sheets and fall asleep in a breeze from an open window. She wanted to sleep for days on end, and to wake up when the whole sorry business of the inquest and the missing boys had been resolved. She wanted sleep in order to put Mrs. Stone’s testimony out of her head, and at the same time she wanted to bind all those words together into a club and hit every man in the room over the head with it. Because they hadn’t really understood the story behind the story, and what Mrs. Stone was trying to tell them about Janine Campbell’s life. Mrs. Stone had called herself plain-speaking and blunt, but she had wrapped every observation in the language of well-brought-up women, with the result that none of the men had any real sense of the anger and frustration that drove Janine Campbell.”

“No, I’m saying that you have got to look and think symptom, not disease. If she’s a symptom, then ask, where is the disease?”

“No one ever does anything our of charity," Anna went on. "Every choice we make benefits ourselves directly or indirectly. Even if it looks like a sacrifice, the alternative would be unbearable in some way. If I hadn't helped I wouldn't sleep well , and I need my sleep.”

“Give children a clock to live by,” Mrs. Lee said. “So they know what’s coming, when it’s coming, how long it will last. They’ll take comfort in that knowing.”

“Young people today (finally, I’m old enough to use that cliché) seem to have no real conception of how bad things were for women and, more important, could be again.”

“Women who did not adhere to the ideals of the time, whose interests and behaviors were considered abnormal and unnatural, were sometimes committed to hospitals and asylums, and in extreme cases they were subjected to castration and female circumcision.”

“When will you stop thinking of yourself as a burden?”

“What an odd idea, really, to know that someone so very necessary in your life was lost to you and couldn’t be called back.”

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Book Keywords:

life, sacrifice, sacrifice-for-gain, unfairness, motivation

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