She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory—you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he’s all out of kilter.

It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.

By the time she had grown sharper,..., she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable- images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn't big enough to play.

May be she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.

The trauma she had endured often manifested itself as quiet tears once she was locked in her room, staring at her graveyard of photos.

…I just think there was some element of burying some stuff so that you can get on with your job and your life. I realized then that I was looking for stories that were behind the act, and I needed to find that, but I realized very quickly how difficult it was going to be. I didn’t want people who were wanting to talk, in a sense.

She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future.

Sometimes she was seized with hallucinations and thought she was buried in some vault together with a lot of puppet-like corpses which nodded their heads and moved their legs and arms when you pulled the strings.

She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she grabbed up to drape her dreams over. In a way she turned her back upon the image where it lay and looked further. She had no more blossomy openings dusting pollen over her man, neither any glistening young fruit where the petals used to be. She found that she had a host of thoughts she had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody know about. Things packed up and put away in parts of her heart where he could never find them. She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen. She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

Sadness and boredom were more bearable than the effort of living a normal life. Perhaps the idea of death began to hover over her during that period, as a kind of higher order of lassitude in which she would not have to move the blood in her veins or the air in her lungs; her repose would be absolute- not to think, not to feel, not to be.

She was reaching for supernatural answers when memory and mundanity were enough.

She brought herself away from the disagreeably clinging thought by her usual method - imagining the sweet sharp sensation of being burned alive.

She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered. But looking at it she saw that it never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams. Just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over.

She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects.