The Virgin Cure Quotes

“Sometimes, for a moment, everything is just as you need it to be. The memories of such moments live in the heart, waiting for the time you need to think of them, if only to remind yourself that for a short while, everything had been fine, and might be so again.”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure

“Mama stared at me not with sadness, but with pleading. She was thinner than I'd ever allowed myself to notice, looking more like a child than a woman. I wanted to believe she knew what was best for me. I wanted to believe she was like every other mother and that she loved me more than I loved her. I hoped, if I followed her wishes, I would finally make her happy.”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure

“All you need to know about men is this - they have a great need to put their cock into whatever hole they find.”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure

“Sickness made itself at home in their close, dark rooms, disease thriving in the absence of windows and hope.”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure

“Words are an unreliable way to measure the heart“, she said. “I’m more inclined to trust what I observe rather than what someone tells me.”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure

“American girls never whimper.”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure

“The house seemed almost without smells at all, pleasant or foul, leaving me to wonder if the upper class existed on a different sort of air from the rest of the world, a breeze piped into their homes from above the clouds, so clean you had to pay for it.”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure

“Standing in front of the girl's house, Mama yelled up at the windows, "Katie Adams, you whore, give me my husband back!" When Miss Adams' neighbours complained about all the noise Mama was making, my father came down to quiet her. He kissed her until she cried, but didn't come home.”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure

“Like a Gypsy, like a witch, like Mama, she knew how to see things in a person that they’d just as soon forget.”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure

“As we entered the pharmacy, I looked over the items on Miss Everett’s list. Preventative powders, toilet vinegars, lavender water, Macassar oil, sea sponges, smelling salts, Bouquet de Rondeletia, extract of patchouli, Grosvrnor’s Tooth Powder, cherry bounce, anisette. They were the trappings of women and in this case, of whores.”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure

“Mother, if you love her-
Mother, if you love her, keep her clean.
Mother, if you lover her, keep her-”
― Ami Mckay , The Virgin Cure

“A Virgin Cure? It's a lie of the most terrible and monstrous sort." pg. 121
"In 1871, under common law, the age of consent was 10 years of age. (In Delaware it was seven.) The young girls of New York understood (for better or for worse) the value of declaring themselves to be a palatable age to gentlemen. Twelve sounded fr too young to the ears of any man with a conscience or heart. Sixteen, even when uttered by honest lip, inevitably brought the girl's purity into question. Of the years left between, fifteen was declared to be the ideal number." pg 124”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure

“On any given day, acts of kindness occur all across the city. Someone gives up their bed so someone else can rest their tired, aching bones. Someone hands a bit of change to a stranger. There's hot soup and good fortune, soft words and bread.

Then there are the cruel things that happen, the worst that you can imagine. Heaven help you if even one of them finds you. The memory of it will never let you alone.”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure

“In my heart I knew it was the sort of thing she'd find to be a waste of time, but it meant everything to me, the words having come from my heart to my hand to the page, a bit of myself about to be folded square and sent back home.”
― Ami McKay, The Virgin Cure