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

... only a poor freak down on her luck, and an object of the most dubious kind of reality to her beholders, since both the men in the god-hut were accustomed to hallucinations and she who looks like a hallucination but is not had no place in their view of things.

And she would see, once again, the wonder in the eyes of the beloved and become whole. Already she felt more blonde.

'The heart is a treacherous organ and you're nothing if not impetuous. I fear for you, Sophie. Selling yourself is one thing and giving yourself away is quite another but, oh, Sophie! what if you rashly throw yourself away? (…)'

'The Prince who rescues the Princess from the dragon's lair is always forced to marry her, whether they've taken a liking to one another or not. That's the custom. And I don't doubt that custom will apply to the trapeze artiste who rescues the clown. The name of this custom is a "happy ending".'
'Marriage,' repeated Fevvers, in a murmur of awed distaste.

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 do think, myself,' I added, 'that a girl should shoot her own rapists.'
And I gave his rifle such a proprietorial glance that, if he'd anything of that nature in the back of his mind, then he'd got another think coming.

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.