“To become the object, she takes herself and transforms herself into a thing: all freedoms are diminished and she is caged, even in the cage docile, sometimes physically maimed, movement is limited: she physically becomes the thing he wants to fuck.”

“Ah," she said to herself, "want of an object to live for—that's all is the matter with me!”

“She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwilling animal that was well and truly caught, she could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind.”

“She wanted a book to take her places she couldn't get to herself.”

“What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?”

“And although she was sometimes dissatisfied with herself, she felt unable to go beyond her own limitations. Books were safer.”

“The candlelight dances off her mahogany-coloured skin as she un-robes, and she is smiling from the very middle of herself, and you look at them and you think "This is the one, this is it" and then—and then the cage comes down!”

“She described herself as happy. This diagnosis did not come from any welling up of joy inside herself. It came from the observed fact, looking at herself objectively, that whenever she decided she wanted something she always got it, and what other definition of happiness could there be?”

“And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she’d worn, the insecurity she’d felt, all the innocent mistakes she made.”

“She got tired of herself. She got tired of not being able to say what she wanted or do what she wanted or even want what she wanted.”