Bad Dreams Key Quotes

An Abduction

Jane: flat, bland surface, plain, ugly, pudgy, listless, Bo Peep, ‘nobody noticed’

Mother + Daughter: ‘sultry faces’, ‘her role to fill awkward silence’, ‘parade her femininity in the kitchen’.

Transition: ‘trek towards adulthood’, ‘she watched it hungrily’, ‘erotic excitement’, ‘her old self, her new self’, ‘I move so that his hand is touching me’

Power Dynamics: ‘now she belongs to use. We’ve got dirt on her’, ‘he had power over her’, ‘swim nude’, ‘cold from the water and from fear’, ‘raw sensibility: fatalistic, acutely responsive, open to anything’

Fiona + Jane: ‘she can borrow my old swimsuit if she wants’, ‘whats-your-name’, ‘older, prettier, more sophisticated girl’

Impact: ‘heavy patient sorrows’, ‘repressed desires’, ‘wrong side of the barrier, cutting her off from the real life she was meant to be living’, ‘never assimilated the experience’, ‘fearful for her own daughters’, ‘sealed compartment’

The Stain

Over violations: ‘kissed her on the cheek’, ‘he touched her legs’, ‘deprived forever of physical contact’, ‘couldn’t she spare the old man a little out of her surplus’, ‘kepts him at arms length’, ‘[he told her] that she was beautiful and graceful young woman’.

Transformation: ‘tuck a napkin under his chin’, ‘made her life seem shallow in comparison’, ‘her life must seem tame and timid to him’, ‘South African Defence Force’, ‘amnesty’, ‘no violent shock, only a settled change’, ‘she couldn’t forgive herself for her innocence’, ‘she thought with distaste now of the old man’s soiled linen’

Hiding of past: ‘she’s my treasure’,’doesn’t know her own goodness’, ' ‘jarred by some false, sentimental note in his performance’, ‘aimed challengingly at his family’, ‘he was never like that with us’, ‘father and daughter were almost strangers to each other’, ‘she was awkward in his company’

Deeds Not Words

Conservative Views: ‘too sceptical to be an enthusiast [Edith]’, ‘blasted suffragettes’, ‘what would she vote for?’, ‘angry pamphlets’ (minimising)

Edith’s descriptions of Laura: ‘freshly astonished’, ‘petty over borrowed teacups’, ‘smouldering’, prior: ‘graceful, earnest, soft hair’ after: ‘oddly stooped, hair lay dead flat, lustreless and clammy complexion’.

Power dynamic: ‘she couldn’t escape it: he had power over her’, ‘deaded that her body would bloom and fade under her clothes without any man ever knowing it’, ‘she wasn’t the kind of woman a man would go to war for’.

Shared shame: ‘both of them were broken’, ‘in their shame, they could hardly bear to look at eachother’

One Saturday Morning

Physical descriptions: ‘thin and strong boned’ not like her mother who was ‘opulently attractive: shapely’

Transformation: ‘she feld how inadequate she was to entertain him’, ‘Carrie felf guiltily responsible for his restlessness’, ‘absence was a physical pain’, ‘her relief [of finding the letter] was trivial…had been displaced by something quite incommensurate with it’, ‘grew hot with the memory of the rude letter, her wrong judgement of what was funny and what was shaming.’

Discovery of death: ‘Carrie felt as if she weren’t present at the scene, she was disembodied.’ ‘terrible knowledge’, ‘if only she hadn’t let Dom Smith in the house’, ‘she wished fiercely that she hadn’t learned about Helen’s death’, ‘Dom was turned into a figure of dread’

Family roles: 'ballet, piano lessons’, playing cricket, ‘fairly oblivious of his family’s social life’

Experience

Laura’s inexperience: ‘inexperience’, ‘nobody’, ‘wouldn’t count as a real intrusion’, ‘flamboyantly on display’, ‘careless of who might be watching’, ‘I’ve never lived’, ‘found my way into the inner workings of the house, or Hana’

Julian as a gateway: ‘frightened and excited’, ‘I was ready to submit to it’, ‘cross the threshold and be initiated into real life’, ‘my innocence was a sign of something unfinished in me’, ‘older and more experienced’

Laura’s marriage: ‘shedding it all behind as cleanly as skin’, ‘I was like one of those child brides’

Costume: ‘each outfit a performance in itself’, ‘I felt that I was a little girl playing in my mother’s clothes’

Hana’s descriptions: ‘Everything was ‘amazing’ or ‘terrible’, ‘he hurts me and frightens me’

Bad Dreams

Bland life: ‘Susan lived to a ripe old age’, ‘was full of horror’,’Susan was the dullest of the Swallows, tame and sensible’,’Wasn’t she just a girl with everything ahead of her?’

Creating chaos: ‘She wanted in sudden passion to break something, to disrupt this world of her home’,’her whole body rejoiced in the chaos’

Mother + Father: ‘he were exposed and vulnerable’,’her mother was capable; she was the whole world’, ‘she could’ve been a painter, she thought in a flash of anger, not a housewife and a dressmaker’,’silent violence’

Repeated cycle: ‘she leaned back into his kiss…to give herself to him’,’she needed to start reading it all over again, from the beginning.’

Flight

Relationship: ‘quarrel shadowned all of Claire’s relations with her family’, ‘now time to dispel the shadows’,’monstrous in Claire’s selfishness’,’spent a long time looking for a silk scarf for Susan’,’rather than anything between them in the past’

Appearances: ‘Susan was only three years older, but she’d stopped bothering’,’But she [Amy] still had her sulky, sexy prettiness’

Motherhood: ‘everyone loaded all this long-suffering virtue onto their mother figure, to save themselves from trying harder’,’made Claire uneasy in how …some kind of saint’

Transformation: ‘stabbing sorrow’,’she knew from experience how to push that sorrow down and bury it’,’she could cope with that and get over it’ ‘the old way of being gripped her with mingled nostalgia and dread’

Under the Sign of the Moon

Appearances: ‘papery’,’sagged’ ‘criss-crossed by tiny creases’,’muted’ feelings, ‘persisting through grim effort’, ‘she never used to wear [foundation] but thought she needed it now to make herself presentable’,’it seemed significant, but not unbearable, to be confronting her own worn-out face with such purposeful attention’

Illness: ’deep ache where her womb once was’,’she dreaded the smiling pretence even more than the bleak truth’,’a tiny atom beside the cold, hard masses of history and politics, full of cruel truths’, ‘presenting a face wiped clean of knowledge, ‘appealing above her head to the doctors, as if her mother couldn’t be trusted understanding her own disease’, ‘Greta enjoyed noticing that he had a weakness for sweet things’

Relationship: ‘he was needy and lonely. She was needy, too. They might as well keep eachother company.’, ‘get up right now’,’you’re making a spectacle of yourself’,’he was a chameleon…fit any circumstances-to please her…appear competent and connected’

Greta + Kate: ‘her awareness [of Kate’s movement] was like a thick thread of feeling, connecting them materially’,’Kate’s youthful looks were somehow balanced against hers, redeeming them’,’not that Kate wasted much time staring at her reflection’

Greta + Ian: ‘she has learned to never relax her guard’,’he could snatch his favour away from one moment’, ‘the whole idea of her mother’s past made Kate uneasy’

Her Share of Sorrow

Appearance: ‘Plump and stubby’,’short fat arms’,’she looked like a changeling’, Dalia: ‘hollowly thin’,’smouldering and mysterious’

Experience of reading: ‘seemed to drearily like her own real life childish routines’,’she hadn’t had any idea that books could transport you like this-into somewhere better’,’insubstantial fiction [real life]

Family treatment of Ruby: ‘he was not above teasing his exasperating sister’,’ravaged by the emotion in the story…shoulders were shaking’

Transformation: ‘a mysterious fever struck down…they has all passed beyond that river…Lady Carole was left alone’,’something delicate in her story needed protection’

Silk Brocade

Appearance: ‘wasn’t sophisticated anyway’,’too bulky, planted there too stolidly’,’heavy bust’,’self-conscious about her broad hips’

Costume: ‘if only you could find the right clothes…you could transform yourself’,’absorbed … in projects of transformation, changing their clothes or their rooms or themselves’

Foreshadowing: ‘brilliant and without consequence’,’peaking and subsiding but running weightlessly on and on’

Jacket: ‘a jacket out of an old length of silk brocade’, ‘a jacket hardly mattered, in the scheme of things’

Jealousy: ‘Kit went all out to win her over’,’Kit’s crazy exuberance, her flattery’,’Didn’t Ann just wish she’d got to him first, before Nola Higgins?’,’He’d [Blaise] seen right through them and didn’t like them very much’