Irish was a man of parts even if some of them didn't work too well.

And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar

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.

One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.

The 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.