"Wendy stubbornly insisted on a cup when I offered my breast. I was destroyed. I had intended to nurse her for at least another year, in keeping with my Earth Mother self-image. This was my first hint of the enormity of my folly: Wendy was supposed to be an extension of me, my lifeline to the Future. Was it really possible that she might have things she wanted to do?" [392]
"It's not enough! It's not enough, I kept wailing. So what if you do have descendants? That still doesn't prevent your suffocating on factory emissions, doesn't prevent your suffocating on factory emissions, doesn't prevent your being sizzled in a nuclear holocaust, doesn't prevent your dying an agonized death. If you are lucky, the most you can hope for is to be lowered into the ground where you will rot and be eaten by worms....
The world needed me, and I was trapped here in the woods rinsing bibs and mashing bananas! For a fucking little vampire bat of a kid who flourished by sucking my strength, leaving me shriveled like a poorly embalmed mummy in the process...." [394-5]
"'No, I've never been married," he mumbled. "And that's the only way I'd want to get into a baby trip with a woman. I've been around friends' children a lot. But to tell the truth--pardon me, delightful baby--the concept of parenthood never really appealed to me.'
'Oh, come on! How could any adult not relish the prospect of a baby of his own--to carry his genes proudly down through the centuries?' I asked this sarcastically, mocking my former romantic notions of what parenthood entailed.
'I never looked at it that way. I always saw the world as a stage--from too much Shakespeare in prep school, I guess. And any child of mine would be a ballsy young actor waiting to run me off stage altogether, watching and waiting to bury me, so that he could assume center stage.'" [424]
"The Vietnam war had been a symbol to me for years, an abstraction signifying various things. I'd never known anyone who'd been in it, much less anyone who'd left it. It occurred to me that deciding what to do about it constituted the real rite of passage for the males of my generation. How they conducted themselves would determine the course of their futures. And like the puberty rites of a primitive tribe, only the males were privy to the secret joys and terrors of the ordeal. A woman could only watch with awe from the sidelines at the grim and terrible struggle. Just as males couldn't really participate in a woman's equivalent ordeal of what to do about an unwanted pregnancy. The issues of life vs. death, an individual's duties vs. his rights, seemed to get grappled with quite early by a great many people." [436]
"Ginny froze, thinking of her bruised mother, who had been a real wife, a real mother--for as long as she was needed. How would her mother advise her? To profit from her example and behave differently, or to copy her martyrdom and thus validate it? Ginny studied the question. Then she remembered that what her mother wanted or didn't want of her was no longer to be the determining factor in her life. The leading lady had magnanimously removed herself from Ginny's script. Ginny was on her own. And there was too little time left to condemn herself to a living death at age twenty-seven." [498]
"As she lay on her mother's death. She had learned at least one thing. Dying was apparently a weaning process; all the attachments to familiar people and objects had to be undone. There her mother had lain, her body decaying and in constant pain, her eyes bandaged, her surroundings sterile, nurses and doctors rushed and overworked, food bland and repetitive--what was there that could possibly have held her? There was a family clock. There was a huge white house, built by her megalomaniacal father. There were cherished photos of her ancestors. There was a red squirrel in an elm tree. There was her anguished daughter, demanding as her right to be told things that could be learned only be going through them. All these had to go. Her mother had had to work on doing without them because she must have suspected that she was about to leap into a realm where she would have none of these familiar comforts to orient her, where unresolved earthly attachments would only have flayed her to bits. Like a squid, she had carefully drawn in her tentacles. And presumably, when she had done so, she ended it all, of her own accord, springing away free at last from the bruised body that had served her well and then had failed her abysmally. Having been preceded by this deliberate diminishment of self, by this scaling down of earthly existence to a recurring series of unpleasant or uninteresting routines, her death had been like the dislodging of a dried brown leaf from a tree branch in a soft breeze. Rather than like the violent uprooting of a healthy sapling in a hurricane, as had been the case with Eddie, who had had so much still to do and so much still to learn.
Or at least that was how Ginny chose to think of the process that her mother had undergone. How was she to know? But if that view was correct and one ended it by choice when the weaning was accomplished, then Ginny felt that her time had come too. She had died several small deaths already, to ways of life and people loved. The Big One didn't seem very imposing anymore. Everyone who had been important to her was now dead, or as good as dead for her purposes. She had nothing that she dreaded being severed from. Her tapes had been erased. What was there to hold her here? Why should she go through forming new attachments, only to have to renounce them later when Death finally brought her to her knees? Why not end it now? As she saw it, the only way to outwit Death was to kill herself." [498-9]
"She seized a hunting knife down from the wall. Sitting on the stone steps she made a small experimental cut in her left wrist. Laying the knife aside, she watched as a drop of blood popped up and grew and grew, into a large red globule. If she smeared this blood onto a slide and placed it under Dr. Vogel's microscope, she'd witness a universe in miniature. She'd see teeming swarms of dots floating around mindlessly in plasma. It would look almost like the photo in her college astronomy text--taken by a high-powered telescope in toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy--of the amassed suns of billions of invisible planets." [502]
-- Lisa Alther
