"You feel like you know me, Cady, but you only know the me who comes here," he says. "It's—it's just not the whole picture. You don't know my bedroom with the window onto the airshaft, my mom's curry, the guys from school, the way we celebrate holidays. You only know the me on this island, where everyone's rich except me and the staff." (39.14)
Cadence doesn't make an effort to know Gat outside of Beechwood—to do so would mean a serious shattering of romantic illusions. But can you really love someone if you only know them in one context?
Quote 2
"There's nothing Heathcliff can ever do to make these Earnshaws think he's good enough. And he tries. He goes away, educates himself, becomes a gentleman. Still, they think he's an animal." (39.26)
In Wuthering Heights, Catherine says of Heathcliff, "I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches, and every word he says—I love all his looks, and all his actions, and him entirely, and altogether." Kind of sounds like Cadence talking about Gat, no?
"But the thing that makes me really messed up is the contradiction: when I'm not hating myself, I feel righteous and victimized. Like the world is so unfair." (52.23)
Even when you're as brilliant as Gat, you can't help internalizing prejudice. Plus, hanging out with Harris Sinclair would probably give you an inferiority complex, even if you were the whitest, blondest person on earth.
"It's like, if he called me Gat, he'd really be saying, How was your school year, Indian boy whose Indian uncle lives in sin with my pure white daughter? Indian boy I caught kissing my precious Cadence?" (64.6)
Refusing to address someone by name is the ultimate insult. It's like saying, "I see you there, but I'm going to pretend you're invisible." Ugh.
"We have a warped view of humanity on Beechwood," Gat said. "I don't think you see that." (7.27)
Cadence can't see it because she lives with that warped view year-round—she might not always be on Beechwood, but she's a Sinclair year-round.
"Clairmont seemed like the seat of the patriarchy […] We figured if the house was gone, and the paperwork and data inside it gone, and all the objects they fought about gone, the power would be gone." (70.18)
It's naïve of the Liars to think that Harris wouldn't have backed up his paperwork. After all, the aunts walk around with electronic inventories of his possessions—it's not like the Sinclairs don't know what they have. Arguably, this is all the know.