The Rag Doll Contract Quotes

“If I could have just loved the endeavour as much as its rewards, maybe my life would have been different. But the future glistered at me with the light from a thousand stars, crushed across the black skies, peppery and celestial, alive with carat gold promise.”
― Dorothy Herson, The Rag Doll Contract

“Sometimes the City was made milky with twilight, and then I would see the sun on the other side of the glass, declaring itself – alive and rising. I knew there was a world beyond the purplish glow of headlights and pollution. I wondered if one day I might want to rejoin it.”
― Dorothy Herson, The Rag Doll Contract

“Autumn came, wet and ragged. The windows ran with rainwater and dankness, moisture and seasons I couldn’t feel.”
― Dorothy Herson, The Rag Doll Contract

“During Liliana’s visit, Maeve had messaged us fanatically, asking what we were up to and becoming hysterical when we didn’t reply. Maeve despised mine and Liliana’s truce. She could detect it in its glints and gazes, and her inability to control something made her seethe with the hottest rage. She was confused by the effortlessness of our sisterhood. By the fact it existed organically in a world outside of games and rules. It was something pure and incorruptible, and for that - it terrified her. For what if there was a world beyond the one she saw? What if people could just love and be loved without the endless tests and burdens she created in all her own relationships? To accept mine and Liliana’s relationship would be to accept that all the limits and complications of her own life were entirely unnecessary. That her view on existence was flawed. That the universe she had so carefully created to protect herself was indeed collapsible.”
― Dorothy Herson, The Rag Doll Contract

“Maeve had so much fierce love blazing inside her, so much empathy and adoration. It had nowhere to go. So she directed it onto herself, intractably. Her reality became supreme, her thoughts, actions and memories unquestionable. She was failed by every human she knew. So she made a deity of herself. She became an effigy of a person that was superior to the whole world, so couldn’t be hurt by it. This would have been fine, it could have worked out, had reality not been at odds with her infallibility.”
― Dorothy Herson, The Rag Doll Contract

“The dynamics of the client relationship are well suited to somebody who doesn’t have a very good sense of self.

Sir Jerry Grimstone”
― Dorothy Herson, The Rag Doll Contract