lily mock

pain is what shapes us, after all. We are creatures born of heat and pressure and grinding, ceaseless movement. To be still is to be… not alive.

This is why she hates Alabaster: not because he is more powerful, not even because he is crazy, but because he refuses to allow her any of the polite fictions and unspoken truths that have kept her comfortable, and safe, for years.

‘I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all’,

These situations of confinement, of cruelty, of hopelessness, are not without precedent—we’re kidding ourselves if we think of these cruelties as ones unique to a fictional alien planet.

It is human to be afraid of death, of unimaginable pain, and it’s another kind of humanity to transcend it.

What could be more human than want and desire: the machinations of your body kicking in? (And what a strange thing we are forced to admit desire is, when seen at this distance.)

No life is ordinary, the book seems to say. No life is without hope, without light, even during the unimaginable.

She is an example of a person raised without culture, without societal constructs, without knowledge. She is a pure experiment asking: what does a person become when stripped to the core, raised in isolation? What might a woman be like under these conditions? It is testament to the strength and beauty of this novel that she remains a character too,