Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.

The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.

It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?

Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

She assumes that skill will guide her fingertips, that shapely lines will uncoil out of the pencil the moment she starts. Surely talent is a thing curled deep inside, just waiting to be exercised, and at the slightest invitation it will stretch, shake itself, make itself known? Talent, it seems, is not so insistent.

The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments.

Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don't you agree?