Never mind. Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us aas real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.

I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will.

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

Being edited is like falling face down into a threshing machine.

She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.

The world is being run by people my age, men my age, with falling-out hair and health worries, and it frightens me. When the leaders were older than me I could believe in their wisdom, I could believe they had transcended rage and malice and the need to be loved. Now I know better. I look at the faces in newspapers, in magazines, and wonder: what greeds, what furies drive them on?

All fathers are invisible in daytime; daytime is ruled by mothers and fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to fathers than meets the eye.