Quotes from Naomi Alderman

For a man like Bar-Avo, everything is a constant present.

Marriage is only permitted between those who have little in common. One may not marry a close relative. One may not marry a person of the same sex. God, Who created the heavens and the earth, might easily have ordained that a brother and sister could marry, that two women together could produce offspring. He could have so ordered the world that those who were the closest were able to mate. And thus He might have given His creations more comfort. Why, therefore, did He not do so?

Our words will swallow us. We have spat them out, but in the end they will drown us

Small places make for small lives

Age is cruel, and crueller still to women. A woman becomes a ghost when she stops being worth looking at.

a kind of wonder at the secret chamber at the center of every human heart whose contents are unguessable from the outside.

Well, apparently addressing racial inequality in one's work is un-American, so I was hauled before the committee.

patches of light opening up and closing again, the places where leaf over leaf produces a rich saturation of colour, or where the sunshine creates translucency. Like the layered frills of a petticoat or the delicate fanned ceiling of Christ Church Cathedral, so much of what we make in art is an attempt to recreate the simple beauty of a tree.

thought about how God, belief in God, in this God, has done violence to these people. Has warped them and bent them so that they can't even acknowledge any longer that they have desires, let alone learn how to act on them.

We experience the greatest happiness when we have touched the world and left it better, according to the Will of the Almighty.

So I went walking, like the independent woman I am.

We travel from birth to death, from past to future, and each second which ticks by is gone forever.