The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property; (2) that she was a woman which amounts to much the same thing ...

Fashion made a harsh mistress.

As far back as she could remember, she had gone in for day-dreams about what clothes, jewellery and the like she would wear if, like her admired and adored Marie Antoinette, she were somehow to find herself facing public execution.

And in the name of this gospel of freedom, she had imprisoned herself; in the name of "living life honestly," she would go to her death. It was, he supposed, the only way she could make herself feel special.

Death had to take her little by little, bit by bit, dragging her along to the bitter end of the miserable existence she'd made for herself. They never even knew what she did die of. Some spoke of a chill. But the truth was that she died from poverty, from the filth and the weariness of her wretched life.

She was pretty and smart, which makes her death a tragedy. She was poor and black, which means people say they saw it coming.

[After reading out local newspaper accounts of multiple recent attacks on women and the dress of the suspect] However serious this sex attack was, the real crime was against fashion.

She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.

“The burglar suffered a harsh fate,” Frolitz told Etzwane.” The lesson to be learned is this: Never commit an unlawful act. Especially, never steal; when you take a man’s property, your life becomes forfeit, as has just been demonstrated.”
Loy rubbed his chin with uneasy fingers. “In a sense, the penalty seems extreme. The burglar took goods but lost his life. These are the laws of Elphine which the Faceless Man correctly enforced—but should a bagful of goods and a man’s life weigh so evenly on the balance?”
The white-haired stranger offered his opinion. “Why should it be otherwise? You ignore a crucial factor in the situation. Property and life are not incommensurable, when property is measured in terms of human toil. Essentially property is life; it is that proportion of life which an individual has expended to gain the property. When a thief steals property, he steals life. Each act of pillage therefore becomes a small murder.”

If love is a sin, then beauty is a crime

That dichotomy between who she was and who she thought she should be was what really killed her.

I used to think that a man was sentenced to death or imprisonment because he was guilty; now I know that he is found guilty because he is disliked.

Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.

Persons convicted of the forcible violation of any female prisoner shall be put to death.