Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there were many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. This commonsense philosophy had consoled me many times before, and it did now, too.

Think about it. He drinks poison. What kind of man drinks poison? She is the one who stabs herself with his dagger. The manly way.

Janice used to say that instinct was reason in a hurry; I was not so sure about the reason part.

There is lust and then there is love. They are related, but still very different things. To indulge in one requires little but honeyed speech and a change of clothes; to obtain the other, by contrast, a man must give up his rib. In return, his woman will undo the sin of Eve, and bring him back into Paradise.

And whether or not we had now paid our dues, he was my blessing, and I was his.

Who is more amateurish, more vulnerable---those who rely on machines that need to be plugged in, or logged on, or in some other way connected in order to be more than a useless slab of plastic ... or those who have learned to master life without?

I absolutely believe the past had its share of warrior women who fought like men. Whether some of these were the actual Amazons from Greek myth is another matter.