My paternal grandmother would not light a fire on the Sabbath and piled all Sunday's washing-up in a bucket, to be dealt with on Monday morning, because the Sabbath was a day of rest--a practice that made my paternal grandfather, the village atheist, as mad as fire. Nevertheless, he willed five quid to the minister, just to be on the safe side.

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

Sade has a curious ability to render every aspect of sexuality suspect, so that we see how the chaste kiss of the sentimental lover differs only in degree from the vampirish love-bite that draws blood, we understand that a disinterested caress is only quantitatively different from a disinterested flogging.

I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.

They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.