Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein Quotes

“Why do you believe in Satan, but not God?”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“Is love not subjugation, after all?”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“The room around me was strangely quiet, seemed absorbed in its own shadow. This took my thoughts to stories about places that were alive, rooms into which the soul of a dead person had seeped, like wine spilled on a tablecloth.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“She was not yet full and she died, and that is what will happen to this story if she brings it into the world before it is ready, before it has been able to grow, to become life-size, before it has decided to be beautiful or ugly, loving or hideous, before it has been able to grow into exactly what it is in essence: a screaming vessel full of life, so deep that even she does not know its bottom.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“There must be resistance and anger. And she has anger. It is not new anger. It is ancient anger, as old as the rocks. As old as fire and the sea. It is the anger of witches, of all mothers standing with babies in their arms while cooking for a man who is drinking in the pub, of women who lift their skirts if a man pays enough, of women who owe their place in the home to their bodies. It is the anger that acts against the self-evident, against expectations, against yielding, yielding, yielding.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“But there is something inside her that is too strong, that does not want to give in. It is not pride. Not an inflated will. It is not a precarious emotion, but an irrefutable sense of justice. The pure, unbending notion that this concerns her, that her body belongs to her, and to her alone. And more than that. Her mind. Her thinking, her opinions, her ideas. It all belongs to her.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“She doubts whether they believe in free love. Increasingly, she thinks that believing in free love is like believing in God. It is an ideal, the ideal. But ultimately, it does not work. Cannot work. You lose something, every time you give yourself and once again stand alone.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“There are, in essence, two reasons to be unhappy. The first, of course, is death. The knowledge that everything is ultimately meaningless, as it is finite. That everything that has once been will one day be no longer makes it, by definition, futile. Even so, it feels significant when a loved one dies. The discrepancy — that is where the pain is. She knows all about that. And everyone who has ever lived knows it. And that is in fact the second reason: life. Life is all there is, all we have, and that makes it of the utmost importance. Of such importance, we suffer.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“I closed my eyes but could not keep them closed. Something forced them open, wanted me to see, wanted me with bed and all to spin around and around as if on a merry-go-round, to see everything, becoming sick from seeing, from the pain, from the stories forming within me that could find no escape.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“Her story will be about the most frightening thing in existence. Longing, loss, grief.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“A mother’s pain, indistinguishable from happiness.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“Is grief the middle ground between wanting to hold on and wanting to let go? Between wanting to remember and wanting to forget? Was I unable to grieve because I was unable to remember?”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“The sea knows only sorrow.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“It was cruel and it was true and who ever said that the truth must be good? The darkness decided: you cannot be the monster and the victim in one.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“Joy and loss, as if one cannot exist without the other, she thinks. As if everything, everything that there is, is already lost, because one day it will be lost.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“No woman alive can allow herself the luxury of not caring about her appearance. The sheer fact that only a man may say beauty does not matter because it should not matter only goes to show the extent to which — unfortunately — he is wrong.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“In the end, everything slips through her fingers. Because that is how it goes.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein

“There was no kiss.” She turns around. “There was just your tongue in my mouth.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary & the Birth of Frankenstein

“There is a beast inside her, a monster. It wants to scream, it wants to tear things apart. It wants to stamp through the world independently of her and suffer no consequences because it has no conscience.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary & the Birth of Frankenstein

“But she must participate, as she is a woman and no one expects it of her.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary & the Birth of Frankenstein

“I wanted to be inside her head, and I wanted her to want to be inside mine.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary & the Birth of Frankenstein

“A small place where these ghosts were allowed to exist and where I did not have to shy away from savagery.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary & the Birth of Frankenstein

“Here your feet walked on the earth instead of on cobblestones, here you touched trees instead of houses, here you could look all around and around and around instead of only ahead or behind. This place smelled of the world, rather than of people.”
― Anne Eekhout, Mary & the Birth of Frankenstein