Aňa’s Reviews > Nights at the Circus > Status Update

She owes it to herself to remain a woman, he thought. It is her human duty. As a symbolic woman, she has a meaning, as an anomaly, none.
As an anomaly, she would become again, as she once had been, an exhibit in a museum of curiosities. But what would she become, if she continued to be a woman?

It is a phenomenon of the trapeze that its practitioners always look larger upon it than they are in life.

In all this, Mignon assumed a woman’s place — that of the cause of discord between men; how else, to these men, could she play any real part in their lives?

His molten heart spilled out of his bosom and flowed towards her, just as one drop of mercury flows towards another drop of mercury.

She had an exceedingly short memory, which alone saved her from desolation.

(…) and champagne in a silver ice-bucket, deliriously misted with chill.

From beggar to thief is one step, but a step in two directions at the same time, for what a beggar loses in morality when he becomes a thief he regains in self-respect.

The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown. (—Buffo the Great)

She fell to genuflecting in front of the icon. She might have prayed for the soul of her daughter, the murderess, had she not been so weary she could do no more than perform the physical rituals of faith.

The figure engraved on this medallion was that of a (…) phallus, in the condition known in heraldry as *rampant*, and there were little wings attached to the ballocks thereof, which caught my eye immediately. Around the shaft of this virile member twined the stem of a rose whose bloom nestled somewhat coyly at the place where the foreskin folded back. Whether the thing was ancient or modern I could not tell (…)