Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it. - J. M. Coetzee

I find myself wondering too whether he has a private ritual of purification, carried out behind closed doors, to enable him to return and break bread with other men.”

Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange. It is only by alienating the desired that language masters it. The frenzy of desire in the medium of words yields the mania of the catalogue. I struggle with the proverbs of hell.

Always, there were stories on TV and in the papers of gangs, killings in bad neighborhoods, predators roaming close. One morning, I peered with Francis into a newspaper box to read a headline about the latest terror and caught in the glass the reflection of our own faces.