Poor Things

Of all the nations I have visited the U.S.A. and Russia suit me best. The people seem more ready to talk to strangers without being formal or disapproving. Is this because, like me, they have very little past?

“Exactly!” cried Bella with a frightening gust of anger. “I am only half a woman Candle, less than half having had no childhood, the bit of life Miss MacTavish said we dragged clouds of glory into, no sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice-little-girlhood, no early-love’s-young-dream-womanhood. A whole quarter century of my life has vanished crash bang wallop. So the few wee memories in this hollow Bell tinkle clink clank clatter rattle clang gong ring dong ding sound resound resonate detonate vibrate reverberate echo re-echo around this poor empty skull in words words words words wordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswordswords that try to make much of little but cannot. I need more past. On our boat up the Nile a fine lady travelled alone and someone told me she was a woman with a past, O how I envied her. But Duncan will give me a lot of past fast. Duncan is quick.”

the only words which fed my hopes were the second last two which declared she was mine faithfully. This is a conventional business phrase, but Bella was neither conventional nor in business.

Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police. Truth, beauty and goodness are not mysterious, they are the commonest, most obvious, most essential facts of life, like sunlight, air and bread

Notice, McCandless,” said Baxter at this point, “that the fellow writes as you talk when you are drunk.”

Bella has all the resilience of infancy with all the stature and strength of fine womanhood.

Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.

Our vast new scientific skills are first used by the damnably greedy selfish impatient parts of our nature and nation, the careful kindly social part always comes second

I taught her to stitch wounds and she did so with the deft passionate steadiness working-class women bring to sewing shirts and middle-class women to frivolous embroidery. Many lives and limbs have been lost, McCandless, by excluding women from the more intricate medical arts.”

Though looking into the garden she appeared to me in profile, and in her expression and pose I saw what had never been there before: contentment and serenity tinged with melancholy at some thought of the past or future. She was no longer violently, vividly in the present