He is a carnival figure made of papier mâché and crêpe hair; and yet he has the Devil’s knack at cards.
A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster. Her freedom will be a condition of personal privilege that deprives those on which she exercises it of her own freedom. The most extreme kind of th...
She found it made things easier if she dramatised them. Or melodramatised them. It was easier, for example, to face the fact of Uncle Philip if she saw him as a character in a film, possibly played by...
Is it not to the mercies of the eyes of others that we commit ourselves on our journey through the world?
jThe notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.
Yet wild things have a far more rational fear of us than is ours of them...
The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as mo...
Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with.
Sade's manicheistic dualism sees the world as irredeemably evil; vice must always prosper, virtue always despair. There is no hope for us as we are now.[...]Sade's vision is utterly without transcende...
Palyaço maskesinin altında yatan o yüz, uzun yıllar önce tanışıp sevilmiş, sonra da kaybedilmiş, şimdi de yeniden bulunmuş bir sevgilinin yüzü. Onunla daha önce hç karşılaşmamış olmama, bana tümüyle y...
He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance.
For Sade, all tenderness is false, a deceit, a trap; all pleasure contains within itself the seeds of atrocities; all beds are minefields.
She looks wonderful, but she doesn't look right.
People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as though it was quite different. But I think this a false distinction, that...
I fall to the toilette of my hinder parts, my favourite stance when contemplating the ways of the world.
Then, if I am lucky enough to be taken with such poetic pseudo-seriousness, my nether mouth may be acknowledged as one capable of speech – were there not, of old, divinatory priestesses, female oracle...
Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women.
Sometimes it was possible for me to believe he had practised an enchantment upon me, as foxes in this country may, for, here, a fox can masquerade as human and at the best of times the high cheekbones...
Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!
I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs!