Among the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?

In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.

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

He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.

Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.

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

Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time.