Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.

Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.

What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.

Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords.

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead Kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.