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

The one-eyed man will be King in the country of the blind only if he arrives there in full possession of his partial faculties — that is, providing he is perfectly aware of the precise nature of sight and does not confuse it with second sight, nor with the mind's eye's visions, nor with madness.

(…) she seized hold of the song in the supple lassoo of her voice and mated it with her new-found soul, so the song was utterly transformed and yet its essence did not change, in the same way a familiar face changes yet stays the same when it is freshly visited by love.

I probe him further on the 'dishonour' question.
'Wherein does a woman's honour reside, old chap? In her vagina or in her spirit?'

There are many reasons, most of them good ones, why a woman should want to murder her husband; homicide might be the only way for her to preserve a shred of dignity at a time, in a place, where women were deemed chattels, or, in the famous analogy of Tolstoy, like wine bottles that might conveniently be smashed when their contents were consumed.

When she dropped her wrap and donned her plumed topknot, it was as though a huge, not altogether friendly bird appeared among them. She cast a glance at the opulence reflected in the mirror, admired her own bosoms. In the auditorium, they demanded her. She cocked an ear.
‘Suckers,’ she said.

(…) concerned only to give the illusion of intentional Bedlam, for the show must go on. And, even if Buffo at last had contrived to plunge his carving knife into the viscera of the Human Chicken, nobody in that vast gathering of merry folk would ever have been permitted to believe it was real manslaughter; it would have seemed, instead, the cream of the jest.

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.