The Anniversary Quotes

“At that age, at that time of my life, refusal involved a kind of strategising for which I lacked the language. I didn’t understand how to negotiate my own disavowal – of food choices at a restaurant, of which movie to see, of which route to take through the city, of anything to do with sex – because I didn’t know my own desire, I didn’t know the limits and contours of my own wants, or the boundaries of my own comfort. Or how much another might press these. Because in its best sense refusal is relative, always secondary, always an after-effect of desire or predilection, or just a logical response to the insistence on self-preservation, to life and its livingness. But at that time I had no internalised repertoire of the preferences against which I could measure and assess his requests. Or if I did, I hadn’t found a way of articulating them, of expressing them, of saying with my body or otherwise: This is how I feel. This is what I want. This is what I’m going to do.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Anniversary

“Patrick, telling me how much we had both sacrificed. It was a question of valour, of giving up differently; one form of renunciation being more acceptable than the other.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Anniversary

“But how much ambition can a woman lay claim to before she is ruined by it? Unsexed, seen as living in error. Before it is challenged and held against her.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Anniversary

“All truth cannot be captured in fiction, but I know I am more honest with myself when I am being fictional, rather than pretending to be real.”
― Stephanie Bishop, The Anniversary