Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small on… - Margaret Atwood

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.

underlings given sudden power frequently become the worst abusers of it.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.

And then everything went on very quietly for a fortnight, says Dr. Jordan. He is reading aloud from my confession.
Yes Sir, it did, I say. More or less quietly.
What is everything? How did it go on?
I beg your pardon, Sir?
What did you do everyday?
Oh, the usual, Sir, I say. I performed my duties.
You will forgive me, says Dr. Jordan. Of what did those duties consist?
I look at him. He is wearing a yellow cravat with small white squares, he is not making a joke. He really does not know. Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes, and theirs into the bargain. In that way they are like children, they do not have to think ahead, or worry about the consequences of what they do. But it's not their fault, it is only how they are brought up.