Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.

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.

Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.

He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.

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

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

With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton.