Caroline Bradshaw Quotes

“She was so sure, so present, so easy, so light and gold, while I was all gray and shadow. I was not ugly or monstrous. That might have been better. Monsters always command attention, if only for their freakishness. My parents would have wrung their hands and tried to make it up to me, as parents will with a handicapped or especially ugly child. Even Call, his nose too large for his small face, had a certain satisfactory ugliness.”

″‘So. What’s Miss Caroline got to say for herself these days?’ Call’s face flamed in pleasure. It was the question he had been bursting to answer. ‘She—she said, ‘Yes.’ I knew, of course, what he meant. There was no need to press him to explain. But something compelled me to hear my own doom spelled out. ‘Yes’ to what?′ I asked.”

“What my mother bore him was girls, twin girls. I was the elder by a few minutes. I always treasured the thought of those minutes. They represented the only time in my life when I was the center of everyone’s attention. From the moment Caroline was born, she snatched it all for herself. ”

“Hate. That was the forbidden word. I hated my sister. I, who belonged to a religion which taught that simply to be angry with another made one liable to the judgment of God and that to hate was the equivalent of murder.”