By the end of the affair, she had acquired so much miserable information about men and women she almost decided to give up relationships for good.

She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves.

Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

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

He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.

Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.