The end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: "This is the end." Because it would have been.

The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them.

It is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all.

For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.

Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.