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.

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

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.

There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

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.