Anatomy: A Love Story (The Anatomy Duology, #1)

by Dana Schwartz

A story about falling in love, not just with a boy, but with an area of study and with the version of yourself that you dream of becoming.

Perhaps the answer is not to cut off our limbs trying to contort ourselves into the people we imagined we should be. Maybe the answer is just … to sit. To enjoy the breeze, and the way the tops of the trees look so dark and inky green from a third story window, and to try to write a love story.

What were miracles, but science that man didn’t yet understand? And didn’t that make it all the more miraculous that the secrets of the universe were out there, codes one might decipher if smart enough, tenacious enough?

“I see enough misery in real life to need to see some doctor do it for applause.”

IT’S THE LESSON YOUNG GIRLS EVERYWHERE were taught their entire lives—don’t be seduced by the men you meet, protect your virtue—until, of course, their entire lives depended on seduction by the right man. It was an impossible situation, a trick of society as a whole: force women to live at the mercy of whichever man wants them but shame them for anything they might do to get a man to want them.

Be patient, be silent, be beautiful and untouched as an orchid, and then and only then will your reward come: a bell jar to keep you safe.

Being a woman had closed many doors to Hazel Sinnett, but it had also revealed to her a valuable tool in her arsenal: women were almost entirely overlooked as people, which gave her the power of invisibility. People saw women, they saw the dresses women wore on public walks through the park, and the gloved hands they rested on their suitors’ elbows at the theater, but women were never threats. They were never challenges worthy of meaningful consideration.

“Dead bodies are never going to bite you. They’re never going to do anything to you. It’s living things that hurt you.”

I used to think that I knew everything, that I could do anything. And then you see it firsthand, and you realize how thin the line is between everything being all right and everything being ruined forever and you just become suddenly aware that you know nothing. I’m just a silly little girl playing dress-up and pretending. I haven’t even passed the Physician’s Examination. What do I think I’m doing?”

Same girl same

“Someone should tell you that you’re beautiful every time the sun comes up. Someone should tell you you’re beautiful on Wednesdays. And at teatime. Someone should tell you you’re beautiful on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve and the evening before Christmas Eve, and on Easter. He should tell you on Guy Fawkes Night and on New Year’s, and on the eighth of August, just because.”

“You’re a murderer,” Hazel spat. “Perhaps,” Dr. Beecham said lightly. “But I also bring life. I save lives with the bodies I kill. Poverty is the real murderer, Miss Sinnett. I didn’t create the poor who suffer living twenty to a room in squalor, working twenty hours a day just for a scrap of meat. Is that a life to begin with?”

Pleasure is fleeting. Science, the information you can gather, the things you can learn—these are what last. These are what make a legacy. People like you and me, Miss Sinnett, have the potential to usurp God himself.” His face darkened. “Attachments are pain. You may think you understand pain, Miss Sinnett; I’m sure I thought I did, too, when I was your age. But strength comes in the ability to overcome those human impulses. Sentimentality. Treacle.”

Let’s just say the answer is ‘sorcery.’ Isn’t all science magic to those who don’t understand it? The burden of knowledge is that it turns the world mechanical. I am immortal in a world in which all the miracles have been explained away.”

Love is nothing but the prolonged agony of waiting for it to end. The fear of losing the ones we love makes us do selfish and foolish and cruel things. The only freedom is freedom from love, and once your love is gone, it can be perfect, crystallized in your memory forever.” “He doesn’t deserve to die,” Hazel said. “Every one of us deserves to die,” Dr. Beecham said. “It is our only birthright.”

Even the most basic so-called truths of our anatomy can be manipulated to suit new purposes. The only truth is power, and the only power is knowing how to survive.”

Bodies littered the bases of the pyramids, my dear. All progress requires human sacrifice. They were the poor and the destitute. The city had already killed them, and I was just using every piece of the animal.”

“I suppose what you said was correct. Losing the one you love is the only freedom.”

None of our greatest minds had to toil for their day’s meals before their studying.

“Hazel, there’s no hell worse than a world in which I would see you grow old and lose you and then be forced to live another day.”

You will be the last face I see when I close my eyes and the first one I imagine when I wake up.”

“I will spend my entire life loving you, Jack Currer,” she said. Hazel stuck her hand through the bars to rest her palm on his heart, feeling the stitches she had sewn at the center of his chest. “My heart is yours, Hazel Sinnett,” Jack said. “Forever. Beating or still.” “Beating or still,” she said.

the mornings of solitary walks, and time alone with her books, evenings curled up with a book on the windowsill while the rain fell on the other side of the glass.