How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
That night I lay in bed with an emptiness chewing away inside of me. I said my prayers, trying to push it away with ritual, but it kept oozing back round the worn edges of the words. I had deliberately given up "Now I lay me down to sleep" two years before as being too babyish a prayer and had been using since then the Lord's Prayer attached to a number of formula "God blesses." But that night "Now I lay me" came back unbidden in the darkness.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take."If I should die …" It didn't push back the emptiness. It snatched and tore at it, making the hole larger and darker. "If I should die …" I tried
to shake the words away with "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for behold, thou art with me …" (3.54-56)
This is a pretty grim prayer, but Louise embraces it. Her life has taken a bit of a dark turn lately, so why not keep it going in that direction by thinking about dying? It's very cheery.
Quote #2
I often dreamed that Caroline was dead. Sometimes I would get word of her death—the ferry had sunk with her and my mother aboard, or more often the taxi had crashed and her lovely body had been consumed in the flames. Always there were two feelings in the dream—a wild exultation that now I was free of her and … terrible guilt. I once dreamed that I had killed her with my own hands. I had taken the heavy oak pole with which I guided my skiff. She had come to the shore, begging for a ride. In reply I had raised the pole and beat, beat, beat. In the dream her mouth made the shape of screaming, but no sound came out. The only sound of the dream was my own laughter. I woke up laughing, a strange shuddering kind of laugh that turned at once into sobs. (6.6)
Oh, man. Louise's rivalry with her sister has gotten pretty bad. She sees her sister's death as the only escape from a lifetime of being overshadowed. It's not bad enough that she fondly thinks of a car crash; she even imagines killing Caroline with her own two hands. Now, that's some rough stuff right there.
Quote #3
Relief washed over me like a gentle surf. It wasn't that I'd never seen a dead body. On an island, you can't get away from death. But I'd never found one. Never been the first person accidentally to stumble in on death. It seemed more terrible somehow to be the first one. (8.45)
Louise has just found Auntie Braxton's body lying in her house, and she's pretty shaken up by it. Sure, she knows people die, but she's never been the first person on the scene. There's something pretty awful about being surprised by death on a perfectly pleasant day. Guess it means you can never quite keep death at bay.