Lady Macbeth Quotes

“Perhaps it is not cleverness that seeps through the generations but cruelty. One cold creature weaning another.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“And there is nothing more dangerous than a creature who pretends to be one thing and is in truth another.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“This is a man's first, last, and greatest fear: a world that exists empty of him.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“When a crown falls, many arms reach out to catch it.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“Madness, of all things, is the most unforgivable in a woman.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“If she were a man, he would not ask her this. For men there is no debt of blood which goes unpaid. If the world tips in another's favor, it must be made to tip back again. But the world is never in a woman's favor. She cannot tip the scale. The only choice is: live the same mute, unjust life you have always lived, or tear apart the world itself.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“Roscille wonders how many women have stood precisely where she is standing, watching their husbands disappear. Roscille wonders how many of them have imagined the sword-thrust that will make them widows. She wonders how many smiled at the thought.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“In that moment, Roscille slips out of herself and, like a specter, Lady Macbeth slips in.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“Now she is a creature in a conch shell, everything spiraling out from around her.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“The truth is found in whispers, in sidelong glances, in twitching jaws and clenching fists. What is the need for a lie when no one is listening?”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“But it only takes a crack in the foundation of the world to bring careful architecture, strong with centuries, crumbling down. A small blade cuts the water and ripples outward like an echo. And then the world beneath shows itself, first as green shoots in the dirt. And then comes a woman, a witch, tearing her way through the green with her teeth.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“She should not wear a white garment ever again. At least a dark linen will better hide the blood she sees dripping from her hands, soaking the hem of her dress, and pooling on the floor around her feet.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“He is slippery like the cold side of a cliff. And layered, like striated bands of erosion, green and white and rust-colored lash-marks of the sea. Each time she thinks she knows him, the water level lowers, and another shade is revealed.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“No," he says. "You have been made to fit a shape that confines you. That does not serve you,”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“It is this gesture of tenderness that nearly undoes her. How easy these metamorphoses are: men crawling backward to their boyhoods, cold masks slipping to reveal stricken faces beneath.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“They are two fish in a pool, circling each other, trapped by the same arrangement of stones. Their rhythms are identical, as they push their silver bodies through the water, in and out, like needles through black cloth. He’s the only one who may see her truly. And she does not know why, not yet, but her eyes are two mirrors, throwing his own reflection back at him.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“Lady Roscille. What they say is true. You are so beautiful the moon itself is shamed from rising.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“If I have a witch to thank for my curse, she did not change me. She only revealed me.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“The wickedness, growing long green tendrils through her veins.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“Violence is like coin. If you spend it easily, people will think you imprudent and reckless. If you save it and spend it only in the most vital moments, people will think you canny as an ermine.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“In order to be seen as merciful, one must first be seen as powerful. There is no mercy that a sheep can show a wolf.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“As each blow lands, Roscille imagines that her body is not her body, that she is in fact a serpent-woman like the Melusina, and instead of legs she has a scale-patterned tail, thick with muscle and fat, impenetrable to the weak weapons of men.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“She has arranged herself into a shape that pleases him.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“Here is the foreign bride who is learning to speak Scots like a native. Here is the girl asking for a cloak made from the creatures of her new homeland. Here is the Lady who has killed for him three times over, and then washed the blood from her hands and pretended to shrink and simper under her veil. Here is a witch who wears her manacles like bracelets, who calls her shackles armor. Here is the wife who has served him in every manner a wife is meant to serve her husband. Except for one.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“You may succeed in convincing others of this, others who luxuriate in the idea that women have no power except that which men grant them.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“I know that it is," she says, "to see men shrink from you.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“Now she wonders - is the weasel truly clever, or are its teeth merely sharp?”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“She is so angry at herself for this: her silence.

The abbey at Naoned had a book of saints in which all their various martyrdoms were accounted. Roscille remembers reading of one woman who was put to death for refusing to renounce her faith in God. She was burned alive at the stake. The book stated that she did not protest, did not even scream as the flames ate at her flesh. Roscille stole this book from the monks’ library and brought it to her father. She was still foolish enough, then, to believe Wrybeard had any interest in cultivating the mind of his bastard daughter.

"What is the point of being martyred if you do not scream?" she asked. "Wouldn’t it be thought that you do not care enough about your life to protest its end?"

The Duke looked at her with tepid interest.

"No worldly agony is greater than what our imagination can conjure," he said. "There was no need for this girl to scream. Everyone who looked on could imagine her pain. The pain is the protest.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“the man who acknowledges his monster is always wiser, kinder, nobler than the man who does not. These men fester with ghoulish wounds.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth

“But she is not now what she was then. Her flesh has thickened. She may look a fragile flower, white-petaled, but this merely conceals her; it does not bind her.”
― Ava Reid, Lady Macbeth