Possession

by A.S. Byatt

Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance.

For the difference between poets and novelists is this—that the former write for the life of the language—and the latter write for the betterment of the world.

They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared.