June Osborne Quotes

Now I’m awake to the world. I was asleep before. That’s how we let it happen. When they slaughtered Congress, we didn’t wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the Constitution, we didn’t wake up then either. They said it would be temporary. Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.

You don’t know what you’re capable of until you have to do it.

It’s their own fault. They should have never given us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army.

Why does healing have to be the only goal? Why can’t we be as furious as we feel? Don’t we have that right?[to Moira]

I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

Wear the dress. Pull the strings.[to Serena]

We get so comfortable with walls. It doesn’t even take that long. Wear the red dress, wear the wings, shut your mouth, be a good girl. Roll over and spread your legs. Yes, ma’am. May the Lord open.

The perfect gift. A girl trapped in a box. She only dances when someone else opens the lid, when someone else winds her up. If this is a story I’m telling, I must be telling it to someone. There’s always someone, even when there is no one. I will not be that girl in the box.

Stay in Gilead long enough and it starts to eat you from the inside out. That’s one of the things they do. They force you to kill, within yourself.

I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there’s nothing I can do to change it. I’ve tried to put some of the good things in as well.[to her baby]

You will never be free of me. You will never be free of me until both of my children are safe.[to Serena]

Who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow. Not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.