Making poison is as much fun as making a cake. People like to make poison. If you don’t understand this you will never understand anything.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

He feels the need to hear a human voice—a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion—his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that, I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone. A lie which was always more disastrous than the truth would have been.