Mocking Willow

“Women are objects, commodities, some deemed more expensive than others. But it is only by asserting one's humanness every time, in all situations, that one becomes someone as opposed to something. That, after all is the core of our struggle.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating

“As rumor had said, he found several corpses strewn carelessly about the floor. Since the glow of the light was feeble, he could not count the number. He could only see that some were naked and others clothed. Some of them were women, and all were lolling on the floor with their mouths open or their arms outstretched showing no more signs of life than so many clay dolls. One would doubt they had ever been alive, so eternally silent they were.”
― Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

“To hell, to hell with balance! I break glasses; I want to burn, even if I break myself. I want to live only for ecstasy. Nothing else affects me. Small doses, moderate loves, all the demi-teintes – all these leave me cold. I like extravagance, heat… sexuality which bursts the thermometer! I’m neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous - lava, inflammable, unrestrained. I feel like a jungle animal who is escaping captivity.”
― Anaïs Nin, Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934

“The word ‘fleisch’, in German, provokes me to an involuntary shudder. In the English language, we make a fine distinction between flesh, which is usually alive and, typically, human; and meat, which is dead, inert, animal and intended for consumption. Substitute the word ‘flesh’ in the Anglican service of Holy Communion: ‘Take, eat, this is my meat which was given for you…’ and the sacred comestible becomes the offering of something less than, rather than more than, human. ‘Flesh’ in English carries with it a whole system of human connotations and the flesh of the Son of Man cannot be animalised into meat without an inharmonious confusion of meaning. But, because it is human, flesh is also ambiguous; we are adjured to shun the world, the flesh and the Devil. Fleshly delights are lewd distractions from the contemplation of higher, that is, of spiritual, things; the pleasures of the flesh are vulgar and unrefined, even with an element of beastliness about them, although flesh tints have the sumptuous succulence of peaches because flesh plus skin equals sensuality. But, if flesh plus skin equals sensuality, then flesh minus skin equals meat. The skin has turrned into rind, or crackling; the garden of fleshly delights becomes a butcher’s shop, or Sweeney Todd’s kitchen. My flesh encounters your taste for meat. So much the worse for me.”
― Angela Carter