They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.

But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture.

When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.

From the time I was little, I'd been kind of freaked out by the whole deal with large groups of people. And even moderate - sized groups of people. It's always made me very uncomfortable. It's such a strange phenomenon, what happens to people when they're all moving in the same direction, all chanting the same tune, the same line of slogans or something. That stuff always seems very alien and bizarre to me, and kind of scary.

But the animation has become very good, and I think that a movie is not a book, and a book is not a movie.

Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do.