The sight of one's own heart is degrading; people are not meant to look inward - that's why they've been given bodies, to hide their souls.

On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.

I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.

For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time.

I was thinking, I could turn him into a fly and drop him into a spider's web and watch him tangled and helpless and struggling, shut into the body of a dying buzzing fly; I could wish him dead until he died.I could fasten him to a tree and keep him there until he grew into the trunk and bark grew over his mouth. if he was under the ground I could walk over him stamping my feet.

Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals.

Let him be wise, or let me be blind; don't let me, she hoped concretely, don't let me know too surely what he thinks of me.