Quotes from Kate Moore

You fight and you fall and you get up and fight some more. But there will always come a day when you cannot fight another minute more.

As Elizabeth put it, "I have neglected no duties, have injured no one, have always tried to do unto others as I would wish to be done by; and yet, here in America, I am imprisoned because I could not say I believed what I did not believe.

Woman is too volatile and spiritual, a being to be kept down by mere brute force," she [Elizabeth Packard] wrote. "You can cage a bird and thus keep her down on a level with her serpent-mate, but just give her the use of her powers, its freedom, and she will rise.

That was the tragedy. Radium had been known to be harmful since 1901. Every death since was unnecessary.

Luminous Processes,' declared the local paper, 'seems to put profits before people.' How quickly we forget.

It was a place where folks were happy simply to get on with life: raise their families, do good work, live decent lives.

But if you looked a little closer at all those positive publications there was a common denominator: the researchers, on the whole worked for radium firms.

Sybil even criticized Elizabeth's housekeeping, condemning her further as a woman who could not properly perform the role society expected. Of one impromptu supper party, Sybil recalled censoriously, "She was out of bread and had to make biscuit for dinner.

Tom watched his wife from the doorway, watched as she demonstrated how she had been killed. Though he had thought himself wrung out of tears, he wept, quietly, unashamedly, as Catherine showed off the simple movement that had left her little more than a living corpse.

Radium was a clever poison. It masked its way inside its victims' bones; it foxed the most experienced physicians. And like the expert serial killer it was, it had now evolved its modus operandi.

That was the tragedy. Radium had been known to be harmful since 1901. Every death since was unnecessary. -- The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

The girls shone "like the watches did in the darkroom," as though they themselves were timepieces, counting down the seconds as they passed. They glowed like ghosts as they walked home through the streets of Orange.