Alias Grace (TV Mini Series)

Part 1 (2017)

Sarah Gadon: Grace Marks

Photos 

Quotes 

• Grace Marks : [narrating]  "Murderess" is a strong word to have attached to you. It has a smell to it, that word. Musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself. Murderess. Murderess. It rustles like a taffeta skirt across the floor. Murderer is merely brutal. It's like a hammer or a lump of metal. I'd rather be a murderess than a murderer, if those are the only choices.

• [last lines] 

  Grace Marks : Now I feel as if everything I say is right. As long as I say something, anything at all, you smile and write it down. When you write, I feel as if you are drawing on me, drawing on my skin with the feather end of an old-fashioned goose pen. As if hundreds of butterflies have settled all over my face, and are softly opening and closing their wings. But underneath that is another feeling, a feeling of being wide-eyed awake and watchful. It's like being wakened suddenly in the middle of the night, by a hand over your face, and you sit up with your heart going fast, and no one is there. And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling of being torn open, not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach. And not even torn open, but too ripe and splitting of its own accord. And inside the peach, there's a stone.

• Grace Marks : [about bed quilts]  Why is it that women have chosen to sew such flags, and lay them on the tops of beds? For they make the bed the most noticeable thing in a room. And then I thought, "It's for a warning."

• [first lines] 

  Grace Marks : [narrating]  I think of all the things that have been written about me: that I am an inhuman female demon; that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard, forced against my will and in danger of my own life; that I was too ignorant to know how to act and that to hang me would be judicial murder; that I am well and decently dressed, but I robbed a dead woman to appear so; that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper; that I have the appearance of a person rather above my humble station; that I am a good girl with a pliable nature, and no harm is told of me; that I am cunning and devious; that I am soft in the head, and little better than an idiot. And I wonder: how can I be all these different things at once?

• Grace Marks : I did not want to be led into a grave sin of that kind, though I was afraid that the fiery red anger that was in my heart against him would drive me to it.