Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force

When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.

In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.

He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.

If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?

Reciprocity of sensation is not possible because to share is to be robbed.