“We sat at long tables side by side in a bigdusty room where we laughed and carriedon until they told us to pipe down and paint.The running joke was how we glowed,the handkerchiefs we sneezed into lightingup our purses when we opened them at night,our lips and nails, painted for our boyfriendsas a lark, simmering white as ash in a dark room."Would you die for science?" the reporter asked us,Edna and me, the main ones in the papers.Science? We mixed up glue, water and radiumpowder into a glowing greenish white paintand painted watch dials with a littlebrush, one number after another, takingone dial after another, all day long,from the racks sitting next to our chairs.After a few strokes, the brush lost its shape,and our bosses told us to point it withour lips. Was that science?I quit the watch factory to work in a bankand thought I'd gotten class, more money,a better life, until I lost a tooth in backand two in front and my jaw filled up with sores.We sued: Edna, Katherine, Quinta, Larice and me,but when we got to court, not one of uscould raise our arms to take the oath.My teeth were gone by then. "Pretty GraceFryer," they called me in the papers.All of us were dying.We heard the scientist in France, MarieCurie, could not believe "the mannerin which we worked" and how we tastedthat pretty paint a hundred times a day.Now, even our crumbling boneswill glow forever in the black earth.”

“One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility”

“In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.”

“I was drawing near to the curve of the track; already the twelve hooves of those dead horses were visible in the distance, jutting towards the sky like the columns in the cathedral crypt at Stará Boleslav. I thought of Masha, and of how we met for the first time, when I was still with the track superintendent. He gave us two buckets of red paint and told us to paint the fence round the entire state workshops. Masha began by the railway track, just as I did. We stood facing each other with the tall wire fence between us, at our feet we each had a bucket of cinnabar paint, we each had a brush, and we stippled away with our brushes opposite each other and painted that fence, she from her side and I from mine.There were four kilometres altogether of this fence; for five months we stood facing each other like this, and there wasn't anything we didn't say to each other, Masha and I, but always there was this fence between us. After we'd painted two kilometres of it, one day I'd done just as high as Masha's mouth with this red colour, and I told her that I loved her, and she, from her side, had painted just up to there, too, and she said that she loved me, too ... and she looked into my eyes, and, as this was in a ditch and among tall goosefoot plants, I put out my lips, and we kissed through the newly painted fence, and when we opened our eyes she had a sort of tiny red fence-pale striped across her mouth, and so had I, and we burst out laughing, and from that moment on we were happy.”

“I have come more and more to the belief that we owe our arts a thousand times what we are paying them. We support our cigarette factories, soap manufacturers, beauticians, all the luxury and pleasure businesses of our over-indulged civilization, but we pay our painters an average wage... and yet when the future digs us from the past they won't care how we smell, what we smoke, or if we bathed. All they’ll know of us will be our architecture, our paintings, sculpture, poems, laws, philosophy, drama, our pottery and fabrics, the things which our hands made and our minds thought up - oh, the machines they’ll dig up too, but perhaps they’ll point to them as our destruction, the wheels that drove us down to death.”

“Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.”

“Our destiny is in the way we were born, in the way we were raised, in the sum of the three of us.”