When Fox is a Thousand Quotes

“One must take human form to engage in human affairs. It was difficult.”
― Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand

“I want to be firm that the idea of the traditional itself is highly constructed and highly ideological. This version is one among many. There is no original, only endless multiple trails that point into the past. We can never grasp that past. These stories are always about the present.”
― Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand

“Don’t you have family that looks out for you?”
“I have a family that looks after itself. It looks after me only insofar as I’m part of it. You know what I mean?”
“Not exactly.”
“As long as I am what they expect me to be, they take care of me. Step outside of that and forget it. It’s not that they refuse me anything. It’s just that they don’t understand the other half of my world.”
― Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand

“Men and white women,” said Claude. “Two things not to be forgiven.”
― Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand

“What is the value of human life? We are made up of so much water.”
― Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand

“Artemis, the virgin huntress. It’s Greek. Think of her out on a moon yellow night, arrow notched taut in a bowstring and the taste of blood in her mouth. How seriously her parents considered the effect on destiny in the act of her naming, I don’t know. They had their pick of the pantheon. They could have called her Syrinx and had her running in terror from musically inclined men with hairy legs. She might have been more docile, vegetative even. But she would have had a tune to hum to herself then, high and reedy, remembering river banks. If they had called her Persephone they could have kept her, for half the year anyway, tending a fruitful garden. Though it is true that every fall her memory of them would drown in the icy River of Forgetfulness as she went into the underworld to live with her dreary husband, six bleeding pomegranate seeds glistening in his open palm. It might have been easier, for as it is she remembers nothing of them at all since they were forced to give her up for adoption when she was six months old. The name, which her adoptive parents decided to keep, thinking”
― Larissa Lai, When Fox is a Thousand