All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phen….

we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alon….

His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat..

His touch both consoles and devastates me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone on the roaring mattress while the lovely, moony night….

I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one..

The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence t….

Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!.

With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trump….

Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual..

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death..

In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world..

Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with.

Home is where the heart is and hence a movable feast..

And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of t….

Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason..

The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?.

The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world..

They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at….

I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them..

What would the daughters of the rich do with themselves if the poor ceased to exist?.

One beast and only one howls in the woods by night..