1
" And then came the pain. First in her leg, as if something had sunk its teeth into it. A huge beast, a dog, maybe. It locked its jaws onto her limb and tore at the muscles with its teeth. She screamed, that was all she could do, scream. She could not describe the feeling of having her body ripped apart. She remembered her father's despair, his face as he leaned over her bed, and his words: What is it, tell me, what is it? As she writhed in pain, soaked in her own sweat, Don Guillermo, her kind, good father, waited for her to tell him. For an explanation. A meaningful verbalization of this horror, so that he could understand what was happening to his child. Otherwise, how could he help her? Because her frenzied cries were not enough. Pain needs to be articulated, communicated. It needs a kind of dialogue. It needs words. But only screams and shrieks of pain escaped from the child's lips. "
― Slavenka Drakulić , Frida's Bed
4
" Bio si moja opsesija, moja fiksacija. tvoje je ime za mene bio sinonim za sreću.
I što je najgore, vjerovala sam čvrsto da imam pravo na tebe, na ljubav, na život. Ne, čovjek nema nikakva prava niti garancije, ni za što. On postoji, koprca se, manje ili više je usamljen, i to je sve. "
― Slavenka Drakulić , Frida's Bed
11
" The principal difference between her "seductive" and her other self-portraits was the absence of self-awareness in the former and its strong presence in the latter. With time, she became brutally direct. In her later self-portraits she was no longer beautiful, merely odd-looking. She did not seduce, she simply drew attention to herself. Her face became hard, serious. The pronounced cheekbones and heavy eyebrows looks as if they had been carved out of stone. The stern black eyes looked either straight through or straight past the viewer. She deliberately exaggerated the brutality of her self-portraits. She was saying: Look at me, I'm alive and it hurts. These self-portraits were like attestations to her existence: one, two, three, four...Exhibitionism, they said. But for her, painting self-portraits was a kind of magical rite, a kind of exorcism. "
― Slavenka Drakulić , Frida's Bed