Quotes / With Pearl and Ruby Glowing

"In The Palace, they are the Saint, or the Princess, or the Lady. Superhero names. Secret identities. From the stories which made them feel weak, they take names to make them feel strong. In The Palace, where once people came to watch others in masks and makeup and false names take on false identities, they take on false names to speak the truth."

—The explanation for the story's naming convention in part one.

“You should know, I’ve always hated the way people say that. Loved. Past tense. It’s ridiculous. When someone… goes, you grieve because everything you felt for them is still the same. People aren’t like a bottle of cheap booze from a shelf in the dry-end. When you lose someone, you can’t just pour one out and try again. It’s never been that simple. You still love or hate or feel them long after they’re gone and as long as you live you carry them inside you. That’s just the way it is.”

—Flim

“It wasn’t that, not exactly. She’s… She has friends from school and stuff. She plays with them and she loves Mom and Dad. Maybe that’s just for show, or maybe… I dunno. On TV, they always make it seem like the bad guys aren’t that bad as long as they care about something. In real life though… Well, I guess you know about Viridiana - he doesn’t have anyone here, right? Guy’s a total b-word, but he really loved his kid, that’s what people said anyway, when he disappeared and everyone was wondering if it was him…” He coughs. “Anyway, maybe caring about one person doesn’t matter so much - no matter how much you care about them - if you aren’t willing to do half that for anybody else.”

—Drake

“And let me just say that you have no excuse to think that your story was your fault. I’m a Special Agent of the FBI, a trained expert who had stared the worst of the worst in the face and never batted an eye. If I couldn’t stop this from happening, then how the hell could you?”

—Skipper

"You deserve love too, even if you're ugly and poor."

—Whittany and Brittany

"Loving someone isn’t just a feeling - it’s a choice you make. Every day when you get up in the morning, every night when you go to sleep, you gotta decide if loving them is worth it. You gotta decide whether or not you wanna keep putting the work in. Hurting people is like that too. No one can make you do it. You gotta decide on your own."

—Buttercream

“You know, one of the feminist reforms in the seventies was about making the rape of men a crime? It’s not all about us.”
“No, it’s not. But it could be. [...] It could be all about us. It could be all about women. That would be enough.”

—Dulcinea and Kitty Softpaws

"You can't be an ally if you only support us when it's easy."

—Erika

“An autistic child - an autistic person - will never act exactly like a neurotypical one. That doesn’t mean that they can’t grow up to be well-functioning, independent adults. You just have to accept that they’ll never meet the ‘expectations’ a neurotypical person may have. And that’s okay.”

— Doctor Hooves

“… and the whole of it is making this all about me when I probably shouldn’t because it happened… she happened to him, but then… big-screen monsters never attack the audience and they’re still scary. If you think about it, all the horror in horror movies comes second-hand.”

— Spencer

"It’s okay to be a bad person, I think. As long as you don’t do bad things anymore. It’s too late for us to be good… but we can still do good."

— Flutterina

“Because if they both suck… why isn’t anyone mad that he’s getting away with it? If they hurt each other, why are people only worried about him?”

—Peridot

“And sometimes I think I love my brother more than I love my church, may God forgive me.”
“Well, I’m not Christian, but from what I understand, your God gave you your family, right? That’s how that’s supposed to work? And you get each other to look out for each other. If you love your brother more, I’d just assume He did it right. ‘Sides, aren’t you supposed to be your brother’s keeper?”

—Irwin and Oegwipali

"You know, people here talk about how girls get treated badly in India, and they do, but things like this make me think that here they just lie about it more."

—Professor Utonium

"And… the people who raised me… weren’t much good at that. I was this strange exotic… thing to them. Not even a doll, I was like a dollhouse. Somewhere to put the daughter they wanted once they cleared out everything else inside."

—Ari Hauntington

Before anyone asks, this isn’t about Amber Heard and Johnny Depp. This is about Nicole Brown Simpson. This is about Jennifer Levin. This is about Shannan Watts. This is about Gabby Patito. This is about me. This is about abuse and how abusers often rely on public complicity in order to further abuse their victim once they’re not physically able to do so. This is about the fact that rape and abuse victims are no more likely to sympathize with other victims than anyone else is. This is about the fact that other victims laughed and called me a liar when I was a teenager asking for support. This is about the fact that people refuse to learn or to look at evidence, even when it’s right in front of them. And then they have the nerve to laugh. Abusers have painted themselves as victims before. They will paint themselves as victims again. And it’s still incredible to me how a person can violently mistreat another in front of witnesses and still be seen as the one in need of support when the one they’ve slammed into the ground gets up and throws a punch back at them. Mutual abuse is not real. And perpetuating that myth hurts victims, no matter who is spreading it. Even if the one spouting this rhetoric is a survivor themself. For people who genuinely believe this, I recommend reading up on the subject. https://www.loveisrespect.org/resources/am-i-abusive-too-the-myth-of-mutual-abuse/ and making excuses for an abuser is NOT going to help them in the long run. People have the ability to change, but often they don’t. They never will if you enable their behavior.

—Author's notes from writer Dolly