The Stone Diaries

“Blood and ignorance, what can be shaped from blood and ignorance?—and the pulsing, mindless, leaking jelly of my own just-hatched flesh, which I feel compelled to transform into something clean and whole with a line of scripture running beneath it or possibly a Latin motto.” 

Daisy reflects on her own birth and tries to make sense of her mother dying to give her life. She dehumanizes herself, which is ironic because she is removing the humanity in herself after she has just been made a human in the world by being born. She struggles with ascribing meaning to her life and making something valuable out of the gore and tragedy of her mother’s death.

“Life is an endless recruiting of witnesses. It seems we need to be observed in our postures of extravagance or shame, we need attention paid to us.” 

This passage highlights the importance of perspective, point of view, and autobiography. The novel seems to argue that autobiography is powerful because we need to share our experience with other “witnesses,” and only then does our life have meaning. The novel includes various points of view for one event because have experienced the same thing but are left with different impressions. The important thing is that we pay attention.

“She saw that her old life was behind her, as cleanly cut off as though she had taken a knife to it (that note for her husband tucked under her handkerchief press, a single scratched word, goodbye). Ahead waited chance and opportunity of her own making.” 

When Clarentine leaves Magnus, she gives up her old life and who she was for the 23 years they were together. The violent imagery of the knife is meant to shock, just as Magnus was left shocked with her leaving. Whereas before she felt trapped in the fate that had been set out for her in her marriage, she now feels the power of her own free will.