The Red Word Quotes

“the halo lady robed me in blue or green, like the virgin, but it was always more agreeable to imagine myself as christ. picture me crucified, i thought. i posed with outstretched arms, and i imagined blood trickling from my pierced palms”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word

“It's not fatal when it's a shallow dive. Was that the sum of my philosophy? ... Maybe all that I wanted, all along, was to dabble, to dip toes only, to skim for dross instead of plunging deep.”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word

“o bruce. i know full well you were never real. i know i fashioned you out of the depths of my longing, an idol to worship in the darkness of my own salvage heart. i erected you and excepted you from every rule and made you lawless, blameless, soulless, footless, until it inevitable you should tumble. still i keep hauling the stones for you, bruce. i keep heaping the stones, and laying on the timbers, and piling the brush, and striking the match. but you won't go quietly to your pyre. you won't stay put. o goldbright boy who lives in my blood, you've coursed your way through me for fifteen years. my heart is damned with you.”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word

“this is the trouble with myth. each of us scoops out our own rotten core and spits it out onstage. we stand around the heap of smoking corpses and declare it fate.”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word

“is helen even meant to be understood as a flesh-and-blood woman? is helen a mere apparition of male desire? is helen a commodity to be traded amongst men in the warrior economy? is helen, herself born of rape, an emblem of female victimhood?”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word

“look at them all sobershowered, each whose duty it is to carry the bones back to a man's children. all their bronze helmets held in their laps. look how they are ennobled by loss, valorvaunted by grief.”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word

“Everyone knows the trouble with myth. The trouble with myth is the way it shirks blame.
It makes violent death as unavoidable as weather. All that tragic destiny lets everyone off the hook. Some bored god comes kicking up gravel and, just like that, a noble house explodes into carnage.”
― Sarah Henstra, The Red Word