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1 " Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, but what if you are the beauty? Then, it's the look in a man's eye coming at you, telling you know more than you want to know. It's the dislike they deal you for desiring you. Beauty doesn't write the book or raise the child or learn the knowledge. It's for the beholder, not the holder. "
― Orna Ross , Blue Mercy
2 " A mother's place is in the wrong. "
3 " One good thing about it is how it wises you up early to what most men want from a woman. "
4 " I need more." Thinking he meant water, I reached for the jug. "
5 " Calling all mothers! Some advice for you. If you have a little girl, don't be the kind of mother who says: "All I want is for her to be happy." No, no, no. Want her to be top of her class. Want her to become Chairman of the Board. Want her to marry a millionaire. Want something negotiable, so she has room to rebel. If all you want is for her to be happy, all she can do to separate from you is be miserable. "
6 " My mother was a writer and a thinker and just about the last person anyone would expect to commit murder. Not just murder, patricide. Yet - strange thing - when she said she hadn't done it, nobody believed her. "
7 " We parked in the lot by the lake and as we emerged from the car, the mountains seemed to have closed in around us and the quiet was palpable, inescapable, underlined by the distant, humming rush of Poulnapass Waterfall. "
8 " She's had nothing but love in this house. It's our toxic, sexist, over-sexed society. Girls are falling apart all over the place. It's the corporates." "Huh?" "The way they've cheapened and degraded sex." "Isn't that our fault too? We're the ones who threw off our tops and danced around maypoles in the People's Park." Drop the hypocrisy, we'd cried. Make love not war. Let it blossom, let it flow. Oh innocent us. "
9 " You know, Mercy, it is really very simple." He took my hand. "He has no power, hon. Not unless you hand yours over. "
10 " the body has been used as a form of social control through the ages and how a mature economy can only achieve growth by making us feel abject, hungry and isolated from ourselves and each other. Making us hate ourselves from the inside out ensures we will overspend, over-consume and over-indulge... "
11 " I came to hate how everything gets junked in America: the food processed and adulterated with sugar and fat; the clothes cheapened; the TV dumbed down; the sex commodified. So that no matter how much we're given, we never feel sated, we're always craving. I came to see how we're addicted to addiction. "
12 " Whatever happened to 'mother knows best'? "
13 " on Christmas Eve morning, hours before Zach left or Star arrived, my father asked me to kill him. I'd spent some of that night in a chair at the end of his bed. At one point, he woke and started to panic, then remembering, "
14 " reached up to push the button that released liquid morphine into his veins. "
15 " I need a pill." "What about the pump?" "No, a pill." I took the container, a new one, nearly full, from its place on the window, shook one pill "
16 " I shook my head, just as I had back then. "Let the one you've just had take effect," I said. "You'll feel better then." "There's no better for me." He put his fingers on my wrist, his grip surprisingly tight. "Please. Have mercy." But the pill was already beginning its work, or maybe it was the effort of making the request, of taking my arm, of saying such words. His eyelids began to droop. "You're a clever girl, always were," he whispered. "You know what to do." His eyes closed on the first compliment he ever gave me. "
17 " MERCY KILLING??? "
18 " How could I not stand myself? Was I one person or two? "
