"How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless." "Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them." "I say it's perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances." --
I'd developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all. It was another thing that made me seem like a dick - my stomach could be all oiled eels, and you would get nothing from my face and less from my words. It was a constant problem: too much control or no control at all.
The old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy ... a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of 'solving Amy'. When I'd hold up the bloody stumps, she'd sigh and turn to her secret mental notebooks on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings.
"The truth is, sometimes siblings have nothing in common but blood...Sometimes you stay up late at night, thinking things that make you feel like a heartless monster, wishing for something different and then feeling sick with guilt because you know what the cost of "different" would be...There's a difference between having no siblings and having a broken one."
He had not meant the words in that way. He had been talking strictly about possession. But oh, the longing for his love was an unbearably painful ache in her.
I wish it be understood that she will always be first in my life, before any other member of my family or hers and before all my other duties. I will not tolerate criticism of that fact even from you. I will hear none from you ever again.
Henrietta was bitter. Nothing in her life had turned out well. Like everyone else, she had striven all her life to achieve happiness. Yet it seemed to her that she had never been happy.