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.

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.

The kind of power mothers have is enormous.

Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.

[T]ea, that uniquely English meal, that unnecessary collation at which no stimulants--neither alcohol nor meat--are served, that comforting repast of which to partake is as good as second childhood.

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

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