My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me Quotes

“You're crossing the ocean on a wooden ship. One of the boards rots, so you replace it with another that you've stored on your hold. It is still the same ship? Most people will agree that it is. But what if, bit by bit, as you make your journey, your ships sustains more and more damage, so that by the time you reach your destination, you have substituted each piece with its counterpart and not a single piece remains unreplaced. Now is it the same ship? Why or why not? How much of a thing is its pattern and how much its physical material? I was fascinated by the question of wether and how long you could remain the same person after casting off part of your body or, for that matter, after casting part of your history, part of your personality, part of your life.”
― Neil LaBute, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“The fairytale belongs to the poor. I know of no fairytale which upholds the tyrant or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairytale is an absurdity.”
― Gregory Maguire, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“But a story never told is also a danger, particularly to the people in it.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“You are reading while walking, she reads. You can't see your feet. The spread pages glide over the sidewalk, mottled by leaf shadows, by moonlight and streetlight. Over continents of shadow, continents of light. The book is a bird with white wings. You are a bird. Reading, you can fly.
You are flying now.”
― Joyelle McSweeney, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“What makes us threaten the things we want most?”
― Jim Shepard, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“If you were sad about something that hadn't happened yet you couldn't be disappointed.”
― Francesca Lia Block, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“Feathers needed, swan preferred.”
― Shelley Jackson, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“There’s no such refuge for anyone on earth,” Baba Anya said. “Every soul is its own last refuge.”
― Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“…but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn’t hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin.”
― Gregory Maguire, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“Desiree the child bride, and her sister Miranda, had gone grave-robbing for a wedding gown. In the north end of the cemetery, among the palatial mausoleums with their broken windows of stained glass where the ivy crept in, was the resting place of a young woman who’d been murdered at the altar while reciting her marital vows. The decaying tombstone, among the cemetery’s most envied, was a limestone bride in despair, shoulders as slumped as a mule’s, a bouquet of lilies strewn at her feet. Though her murder, by her groom’s jealous mother, had been long in the past, everyone knew that her father had had her buried in her gown of lace and silk.”
― Timothy Schaffert, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“I could fall in love with you, you know." He’d said that. She’d said it back. Could.”
― Katherine Vaz, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“BENTNECK: Ach, nothing’s free! Life’s a peep show, not a look-see!”
― Joyelle McSweeney, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“anything we refer to as “reality” in fiction is just a shared hallucination,”
― Kate Bernheimer, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“He knows that it happens in this world that you can change in such a way as to never again be complete, that you can lose parts of who you once were—and sometimes you’ll get better, but sometimes you’ll never be anything more than fractional: than who you once were, a few parts hollow. He knows that sometimes what’s missing isn’t somebody else.”
― Kate Bernheimer, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“So now she was wife to a king who would have let her burn, and queen of those who’d sent her to the fire. These were her people, this her life. There was little in it that he’d call love.”
― Kate Bernheimer, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“But a story never told is also a danger, particularly to the people in it.”
― Kate Bernheimer, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“And to hold something impossible in your hands, not just in your heart, was a rarity God afforded almost no one.”
― Kate Bernheimer, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“When Ray had asked her why she was so sad, she’d replied, “Because how can I feel so old without having grown up.”
― Katherine Vaz, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“I could fall in love with you, you know.” He’d said that. She’d said it back. Could.”
― Katherine Vaz, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“...she absorbed in an instant the truth that genuine adulthood comes when one does not run off because of shame, when one stays and demands a home.”
― Katherine Vaz, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“The sea: God’s bathtub, God’s bath toys.”
― Katherine Vaz, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales