Top 50 Christina Dalcher Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We all don’t have to be carbon copies of one another to work on the same team, but we can learn from other people.”

— Christina Dalcher

2. “Monsters aren’t born, ever. They’re made, piece by piece and limb by limb, artificial creations of madmen who, like the misguided Frankenstein, always think they know better.”

— Christina Dalcher

3. “Morgan is an idiot who doesn’t know he’s an idiot. The worst kind.”

— Christina Dalcher

4. “Think about waking up one morning and finding you don’t have a voice in anything.”

— Christina Dalcher

5. “I tell myself to remember that negligence isn’t the same thing as evil.”

— Christina Dalcher

6. “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. That’s what they say, right?”

— Christina Dalcher

7. “After all, one day my daughter will be expected to shop and to run a household, to be a devoted and dutiful wife. You need math for that, but not spelling. Not literature. Not a voice.”

— Christina Dalcher

8. “But there’s Sonia. If I’m going to trade my brain for words, I’ll do it for her.”

— Christina Dalcher

9. “I think it might have been that moment when I started hating my husband.”

— Christina Dalcher

10. “There’s a resistance?” The word sounds sweet as I say it. “Honey, there’s always a resistance. Didn’t you go to college?”

— Christina Dalcher

11. “I learned that once a plan is in place, everything can happen overnight.”

— Christina Dalcher

12. “Curiosity is what we need if we want to know what’s real, terrifying or not.”

— Christina Dalcher

13. “Think about where you’ll be – where your daughters will be – when the courts turn back the clock. Think about words like ‘spousal permission’ and ‘paternal consent.’ Think about waking up one morning and finding you don’t have a voice in anything.”

— Christina Dalcher

14. “I have words now, but no idea how to use them, no clue how to make my daughter’s life better, if only for a while.”

— Christina Dalcher

15. “Don’t you worry, honey. I’ll love you ’til you’re dead. Maybe a while after that.”

— Christina Dalcher

16. “He’s mad, he’s hurt, and he’s frustrated. None of this justifies the next words out of his mouth, though, the ones he will never be able to take back, the ones that slice deeper than any shard of broken glass and make me bleed all over. “You know, babe, I wonder if it was better when you didn’t talk.”

— Christina Dalcher

17. “The films are a distraction, the only time I hear female voices unconstrained and unlimited. Actresses are allowed a special dispensation while they’re on the job. Their lines, of course, are written by men.”

— Christina Dalcher

18. “You can’t protest what you don’t see coming.”

— Christina Dalcher

19. “My fault started two decades ago, the first time I didn’t vote, the umpteen times I told Jackie I was too busy to go on one of her marches or make posters or call my congressmen.”

— Christina Dalcher

20. “Today, she’ll be in a room with twenty-five other first graders, all girls. She’ll listen to stories, practice her numbers, help the older students in the kitchen as they cut cookies and knead dough and crimp pies. This is what school is now, and what school will be for some time. Maybe forever.”

— Christina Dalcher

21. “Patriotism doesn’t require turning a blind eye to the darker chapters of our country’s history; if anything, the opposite.”

— Christina Dalcher

22. “If you want to know what depression looks like, all you need to do is look into a depressed person’s eyes.”

— Christina Dalcher

23. “I want to hear her tell me about Quercus virginiana and Magnolia stellata and Syringa vulgaris in the way she did when she first came to my home, identifying the live oaks and the giant, starry trees and the lilacs with a scent that no perfumer has been able to match. She considered them God’s gifts, and I tolerated that. Whatever might be up there, he or she or it did a crackerjack job with trees and flowers.”

— Christina Dalcher

24. “You want to know how people end up homeless, how anyone could turn away or shut a door or hang up a phone? Just start asking for help.”

— Christina Dalcher

25. “They make so much noise, those boys and those crickets. Deafening.”

— Christina Dalcher

26. “Sonia doesn’t know what the wrist counters do, other than glow brightly and show her numbers and pulse against her wrist, one time for each word she speaks. We’ve been careful to keep this secret from her. Maybe it’s a foolish thing, but I’ve never been able to figure out exactly how to describe an electric jolt of pain to a six-year-old. It would be like telling a child about the horrors of the electric chair in order to instill some sense of right and wrong.”

— Christina Dalcher

27. “You have to, honey,” I said. “Everyone has to take the tests.” “Why?” Why? I tried to think of an answer that would calm her. “So they know where to put people.” And then, “You’ve always done fine.”

— Christina Dalcher

28. “Memory is a damnable faculty.”

— Christina Dalcher

29. “Maybe this is how it happened in Germany with the Nazis, in Bosnia with the Serbs, in Rwanda with the Hutus. I’ve often wondered about that, about how kids can turn into monsters, how they learn that killing is right and oppression is just, how in one single generation the world can change on its axis into a place that’s unrecognizable.”

— Christina Dalcher

30. “One thing I learned from Jackie: you can’t protest what you don’t see coming.”

— Christina Dalcher

31. “Del the mailman is already up the porch steps, courier bag over his shoulder, his key to our mailbox in one hand. He waves to me, and I wave back through the Honda’s rear window.”

— Christina Dalcher

32. “What Lin didn’t consider – what none of us considered – was how much of a bubble our city was, how different from the rest of the country with its bearded duck people and Christian communities cropping up like weeds. There was a documentary about one of those places, Glorytown or Gloryville or something like that, where all the women wore pretty blue dresses with high collars and followed special diets and milked cows. The director, when interviewed, had called it “neat.”

— Christina Dalcher

33. “Everything lately seems to be a choice between degrees of hate.”

— Christina Dalcher

34. “We’re doing everything we can. When the dots connect, I’m left with one terrible, frightening, and at the same time relieving explanation: Patrick isn’t working for the government. He’s working against it.”

— Christina Dalcher

35. “Not your fault,” Lorenzo says. But it is. And my fault didn’t start when I signed Morgan’s contract on Thursday. My fault started two decades ago, the first time I didn’t vote, the umpteen times I told Jackie I was too busy to go on one of her marches or make posters or call my congressmen.”

— Christina Dalcher

36. “They have to put limits on choice for other reasons, for pragmatic reasons. The way things are, the way women are, no one would want a girl. No sane parent would want to choose a wrist-counter color for a three-month-old. I wouldn’t.”

— Christina Dalcher

37. “An hour. Such an interminable amount of time on a rainy day, such an infinite span when waiting for that cute guy in your geometry class to ring, such an eternity to a woman panting and sweating on a delivery room bed. Time is supposed to be a constant but seldom is.”

— Christina Dalcher

38. “Look, I don’t mean to be unkind, but you white gals, all you’re worried about is, well, all you’re worried about is you white gals.”

— Christina Dalcher

39. “Christina Dalcher earned her doctorate in theoretical linguistics from Georgetown University. She specializes in the phonetics of sound change in Italian and British dialects and has taught at several universities.”

— Christina Dalcher

40. “Sonia smiles at me when I tuck her under the sheets. As usual, there’s no bedtime story, no exploring Dora, no Pooh and Piglet, no Peter Rabbit and his misadventures in Mr. McGregor’s lettuce patch. It’s frightening what she’s grown to accept as normal.”

— Christina Dalcher

41. “Women are shamed for this kind of curiosity, cursed for its devastating, world-ruining effects. Much more than men, I think, as I feel the cool metal of the doorknob in my fist. Where are the Bible stories and myths about men screwing everything up? Why are women always compared to cats, curious and relentless, happily wreaking havoc because they just. Want. To. Know the goddamned answer? Why all this, and never a thought to the fact that more men have torn up the world than women?”

— Christina Dalcher

42. “Maybe. I’d just want someone who was tough when he needed to be.” “Patrick’s kind,” I said. “Isn’t that worth something?” “Not in my book.”

— Christina Dalcher

43. “Patrick and the boys, out on the back porch close to my window, are swapping stories about school, politics, the news, while crickets buzz in the dark around our bungalow. They make so much noise, those boys and those crickets. Deafening. All my words ricochet in my head as I listen, emerge from my throat in a heavy, meaningless sigh. And all I can think about are Jackie’s last words to me. Think about what you need to do to stay free.”

— Christina Dalcher

44. “The old saying goes, “keep a stiff upper lip,” but as I watch his reflection in the polished, steel walls of the elevator, I think that it isn’t the lip we need to worry about. The bottom one gives our terror away. Every single time.”

— Christina Dalcher

45. “Our only real hope had been the Supreme Court. But with one empty seat on an already right-leaning bench and two more retirements looming, the Supremes didn’t offer much hope.”

— Christina Dalcher

46. “Her speech is like music, but the lyrics are all wrong.”

— Christina Dalcher

47. “Honey, there’s always a resistance. Didn’t you go to college?”

— Christina Dalcher

48. “It’s some kind of beautiful.” I understood, and still understand, little of Lorenzo’s work, but Patrick’s got the biochemistry background to process it.”

— Christina Dalcher

49. “They were too well rehearsed, almost, too practiced in their even cadence and intonation. Even so, the hesitance was audible – a few too many ums and ahs littered his recital of the president’s intended changes, modifications, dispensations. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly the moment when I realized I didn’t trust him.”

— Christina Dalcher

50. “At the beginning, a few people managed to get out. Some crossed the border into Canada; others left on boats for Cuba, Mexico, the islands. It didn’t take long for the authorities to set up checkpoints, and the wall separating Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas from Mexico itself had already been built, so the egress stopped fairly quickly. “We can’t have our citizens, our families, our mothers and fathers, fleeing,” the president said in one of his early addresses.”

— Christina Dalcher