“It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it…”

“its hard to talk when you want to kill yourself”

“The doll? Who decided that the young should rehearse the physical care of infants, so that they know them as objects to be bounced, cuddled, or abandoned when boring before they know their own, real infants as living beings full of the responsiveness anterior to language that is the basis of all expressed reason?”

“Kitten, when did you get so tall? (Ravyn)
I grew while you were in the bathroom. (Erika)”

“The ways of love are strange and hard: the love you want is always barred; the love you have you want to change. The ways of love are hard and strange.”

“Say, what is the spell, when her fledgelings are cheeping,
That lures the bird home to her nest?
Or wakes the tired mother, whose infant is weeping,
To cuddle and croon it to rest?”

“Sara: "You are so brave," I tell her, and then I smile. "When I grow up, I want to be just like you."
To my surprise, Kate shakes her head hard. Her voice is a feather, a thread. "No Mommy," she says. "You'd be sick.”

“Verily Allah has enjoined goodness to everything; so when you kill, kill in a good way and when you slaughter, slaughter in a good way. So every one of you should sharpen his knife, and let the slaughtered animal die comfortably.”

“What do you want to do, get yourself killed before you are thirty? You'd better get some sense while a few of us are left alive.”

“It’s hard to feel desire when you don’t feel desirable”