Rita Bullwinkel

Every sound other than the smack of a hit is only a distraction

There’s one woman, over there, who may be prettier, if you like girls who look like drug addicts.

There is a glorification, in the world outside of boxing, of desperation and wildness while fighting – this notion that desire and scrappiness can and will conquer experience. No boxing coach has ever asked their athlete to be more desperate. Control and restraint are much more valuable than wild punches

Verbs are the only things that they can clearly hear.

This imagined winning in front of people who will never see her win, even if she does win, is symptomatic of the fact that Artemis Victor, like Andi Taylor, is, more than anything, delusional. Their desired audiences will never see them win.

Nobody can ever possibly know what a specific body is good at unless they’re inside it

Andi had gripped the red-truck kid’s leg too long. She thought he’d keep living if she never let go of him

They were like a Russian doll crescendo of sisters. They looked as if one could fit inside the other

In this way, decades into the future, boxing will be for Andi Taylor a kind of failed identity marker – something she tried on and wore around but that she later realised wasn’t her, or didn’t fit with the rest of her life, or her as a boxer didn’t fit the way the world needed her to be in order for her to survive

Andi needs that imagined praise from them. She wants to watch her visions