“It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”
“The reason we’re such fertile ground for the dark forces of such lies and social manipulation is that we’re dissociated from the genuine light of self-awareness.”
“...the more of us who understand the game and see through the lie and forge ahead in support of every other woman’s right to a passionate response to life, the more we will hasten the end of our jail term.”
“Looking back now, to Rahel it seemed as though this difficulty that their family had with classification ran much deeper than the jam-jelly question.
Perhaps Ammu, Estha and she were the worst transgressors.”
“Just as if I was one of those true knights you love so well, yes. What do you think a knight is for, girl? You think it’s all taking favors from ladies and looking fine in gold plate? Knights are for killing.”
“They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly--that business about the marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.”
“Now, it is very important that you conduct yourself in a manner befitting to your station while at Spence. It’s fine to be kind to the lesser girls, but remember that they are not your equals.”
“After all, they have money and position and Ann has none. It’s amazing how often you can be right as long as you have those two things working in your favor.”
“The homogenizing of European man... requires a justification: it lies in serving a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former which can raise itself to its task only by doing this.”
″‘Go round cringing like a dog, Matt,’ he said, ‘and folks will treat you like one. Stand up like a man, and they’ll treat you like a man.’ That was fine for Weaver, but I wondered sometimes, How exactly do you stand up like a man when you’re a girl?”
“The laws they make in Washington aren’t put on the books because they work well--they’re put on the books because they represent the one right way to live.”
The story deals with a Chernobyl-type nuclear disaster happening on German soil.[9] The heroine of the story is a fourteen-year-old girl who flees the contaminating cloud of radiation and experiences the ensuing breakdown of social order.