Mercy Street Quotes

“If you happen to be a woman, all problems are female problems.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

“In the sad B movie that was life in Grantham, actors were recast periodically, replaced with younger models, but the script itself never changed. It was that kind of town.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

“Drug addiction and alcoholism, depression and anxiety, accidental pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. These conditions are believed to share a common etiology, the failure of virtue. Whatever their diagnosis, all Wellways patients have this in common: their troubles are seen to be, in part or in full, their own goddam fault.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

“It's hard to know, ever, where a story beings. We touch down in a world fully inhabited by others, a drama already in progress. By the time we make our entrance - incontinent and screaming, like dirty bombs detonating - the climax is a distant memory. Our arrival is not the beginning; it is a consequence.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

“She lay awake and thought of her mother, gone forever. There was no one else she wanted to tell.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

“In any industry Claudia could think of, this failure rate would be unacceptable. If breasts were a consumer product, the manufacturer would be forced to issue a recall.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

“Was this a statement or a question? With teenage girls, it was hard to know. They seemed at every juncture to be looking for agreement, consensus, affirmation. To be reassured that they weren’t wrong.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

“A fetus had no thoughts or memories; it had made nothing, understood nothing. And yet, this mute, unthinking knot of tissue—alive, yes, but unformed, unconscious, incapable of tenderness or reasoning or even laughter—was the life that mattered. The woman carrying it, the complex creature formed by twenty or thirty years of living in the world, was simply the means of production. Her feelings about the matter, her particular ideas and needs and desires, didn’t matter at all.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

“Preventing her abortion was all they cared about. The bleak struggle of her life—the stark daily realities that made motherhood impossible—didn’t trouble them at all.”
― Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street