Quotes About Restraint

Then I find I'm not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. I hope they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against the painted barriers, surreptitiously. They will suffer, later, at night, in their regimented beds. They have no outlets now except themselves, and that's a sacrilege.

I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatter-proof. It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.

There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the day of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

Constance did not have a bun. She didn't need one. She more or less was a bun: neat and contained, and then so tumultuous when unleashed.

the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed. The man eyes that were always roaming here and there like the eyes of tigers, those searchlight eyes, needed to be shielded from the alluring and indeed blinding power of us—

take your time, leave mine alone

We fight in whispers or well out of the way, because if we're caught we will both be punished. For this reason we don't tell on each other. We know from experience that the satisfactions of betrayal are scarcely worth it.

It was true she had never specifically forbidden us to do anything - that would be too crude a violation of her law of nuance - but this only makes me feel I am actually forbidden to do everything.

I prefer to be upright and contained -- an urn in daylight.

I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed.

Nevertheless there was something about Crake. That kind of cool slouchiness always impressed Jimmy, coming from another guy: it was the sense of energies being held back, held in reserve for something more important than present company.

I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolour picture of blue irises, and why the window only opens partly and why the glass in it is shatterproof. It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

But unshed tears can turn you rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue.

The difference between a civilized man and a barbarous fiend—a madman, say - Lies, perhaps, Merely in a thin veneer of willed self-restraint.

He liked to imagine that if he hadn't been a minor, and she his teacher and subject to abuse charges, she'd have been gnawing her way through his bedroom walls to sink her avid fingers into his youthful flesh.

Languor is a more efficient method of control.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.

Men and women, they were beautiful and wild, all a little violent under their pleasant ways and only a little tamed.

I'm riding you with a slack rein, my pet, but don't forget that I'm riding with curb and spurs just the same.

She wanted to cry but the tears would not come. They seemed to flood her chest, and they were hot tears that burned under her bosom, but they would not flow.

You look like you'd swallowed a ramrod and it isn't becoming-Rhett Butler

Even if you think such things, why do you say them?" she scolded. "If you'd just think what you please but keep your mouth shut, everything would be so much nicer.

Captain Butler, you must not hold me so tightly. Everybody is looking. If no one were looking, would you care?