Category: neglect
Quotes of Category: neglect
Sister, why do you do that?""Do what?""Cage the animals at night?""Well..." She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me."We don't want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals that are given to us we have to take care of. If we didn't cage them up in one place, we might lose them, they might get hurt or damaged. It's not the best thing, but it's the only way we have to take care of them.""But if somebody loved one them," I asked, "wouldn't it be a good idea to let them have one? To keep, I mean?""Yes, it would be. But not everyone would love them and take care of them as you would. I wish I could give them all away tomorrow." She looked at me. There were tears in her eyes. "But I can't. My heart would break if I saw just one of those animals lying by the wayside uncared for, unloved. No, Jennings. It's better if we keep them together." book-quotefamilyyouthneglectI prepared to get out of bed, tossing the covers aside, the sheets dank-smelling, gray from my body. I wondered how long it had been since I'd changed them. And then I wondered how often you were supposed to change them. These were the kinds of things you didn't learn. I changed bedclothes after sex, now, finally, and that I only learned a few years ago from a movie on TV: Glenn Close, some thriller, and she'd just had sex and is changing the sheets and I can't remember the rest, because all I was thinking was: Oh, I guess people change sheets after they have sex. It made sense, but I'd never thought of it. I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way. book-quotelife-lessonsneglect