Fairy tales are about money, marriage, and men. They are the maps and manuals that are passed down from mothers and grandmothers to help them survive.
A society that doesn’t know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.
The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen’s club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days.
When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.
If you want to learn about a culture, you look at what buildings the people lived in but you also want to know about their cosmos.
I shop online because I don’t like to try things on in front of an alien mirror.
I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.
I avoid looking in the mirror.
Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.
Romance, in its earliest surviving form, was called ‘erotika pathemata’ by the Greeks – tales of erotic suffering.
Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.
The female form provides the solution in which the essence itself is held; she is passio, and acted upon, the male is actio, the mover.
I used to retain information extremely fast, so perhaps it’s hardening a bit and I don’t take the impression as well as I used to. Instead of writing in free flight, I had to check on the stories all the time. So I have decided I better to do it while I am fresh!
Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted.