One of the characters has been beaten up by racist men. Afterwards a friend calls her hard-headed, and recriminates her for having put herself in a position where she could have been killed, when a simple apology could have spared her.
The beaten woman replies:
"I know you can't understand. Apologizing to those men would just have been a different way of dieing. Except I would have had to live with it."
A part of me loves her reply. There are ideas worth dieing for, that part tells me. Another part is distrustful, and wonders all kind of things, like "what about strategy?" and "what part of her would really have died if she had apologized" and "when she says 'I', what does she mean?"
These two parts make a whole, I think. The first one alone can be too easily manipulated; the second one, if left by itself, might turn selfish and calculating.
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