You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn. - Margaret Atwood

You pride yourself on being a realist, I told myself, so face the facts. There’s been a coup, here in the United States, just as in times past in so many other countries. Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.

Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. they dispense no thought with the calculation of risk and profit, they take no thought for the future, they're forced to spearpoint into the present tense. Thrown over a precipice, you fall or else you fly; you clutch at any hope, however unlikely; however - if I may use such an overworked word - miraculous. What we mean by that is, Against all odds.

I’m losing the appetite for strangers. Once I would have focused on the excitement, the hazard; now it’s the mess, the bother. Getting your clothes off gracefully, always such an impossibility; thinking up what to say afterwards, without setting the echoes going in your head. Worse, the encounter with another set of particularities: the toenails, the ear-holes, the nosehairs. Perhaps at this age we return to the prudishness we had as children.