The Falling Woman Quotes

“Each culture defines its own idiosyncracies and then forgets that it has done so.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“What do you do when you are falling? Do you reach out and try to grab for support? If you aren’t careful, you will pull others down with you. Unless you are very careful.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“Popularity is not the mark of a properly rigorous academic work.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“In the United States, people interpret these things as eccentricity or – if taken to an extreme – madness,’ my mother said mildly. ‘Here, they are the mark of a witch. Of the two interpretations, I have to admit I prefer the second. A witch has some power. A madwoman is just a nut.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“We find the Mayan pantheon peculiar. By our standards, suicide and human sacrifice are unacceptable. We tend not to notice the peculiarities of our own culture. We accept the thousands of children who wear braces to correct their teeth, yet we consider the Maya odd for filing teeth to beautify them. Each culture defines its own idiosyncracies and then forgets that it has done so.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“My mother, like the female birds of many species, had developed a drab protective coloration that let her blend into the background, invisible as long as she remained silent. She counseled me to adopt the same strategy, to be quiet and meek, but I could never manage it. I always felt like a fledgling cuckoo bird, hatched from an egg laid in an alien nest, a chick too big, too loud, too rambunctious for its adopted parents. When I graduated from high school, my father suggested that I take a job clerking at the local drugstore. I packed my bags and left.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“Robin forgets, I think, that her own religion involved human sacrifice. She is a practicing Christian. She partakes of Holy Communion, the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the human son of God who died and rose from the dead to bring back the word of his Father. She believes in the Resurrection, but only as something that happened long ago in a distant land, far removed from her day-to-day life. She believes in God, the Father Almighty. On the other hand, if her next-door neighbor were to claim that God had spoken to him in a vision, she would think him eccentric and possibly dangerous. Her God is a distant patriarch who demands that she attend church and follow a set of ten rules, but he does not deign to pass along new rules through common people. She is accustomed to a God who keeps his distance.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“Somewhere at my center, with the madness I had locked away, I had sealed off the part of me that knew how to love. It was too close to the part of me that knew how to hate, and that was at the center of the madness. I had sealed them all away, leaving a dead place...”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“I must waken these somnolent beasts and teach them something, make them blink, shake their heavy heads, and grope for answers in their sluggish brains. I must breathe life into the dusty air.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“The people who have put their minds to translating the Mayan hieroglyphics have come to the conclusion that many of the symbols are puns and puzzles. ‘Xoc,’ for example, means ‘to count.’ It is also the name of a mythical fish that lives in the heavens. So the Maya used the head of the fish to represent counting. But since the fish was difficult to carve, they substituted the symbol for water, since that’s where fish live. The symbol for water is a jade bead, since both are green and precious. So jade means water means fish means to count.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman

“Someone once told me that archaeologists are anthropologists who don’t like live people. They dig up dead ones because dead ones can’t talk back. That’s not quite true. But I think live people are too fast for most archaeologists. We’re a slow-moving lot.”
― Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman