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My mother’s femaleness was absolute, ancient, and there was a peculiar, helpless assertiveness about it. Not the assertiveness of opinion, for she seemed to have no opinion about it and would, even when she was past seventy, merely shrug and looked perplexed when the subject of her own childbearing…

There was a man who brought me my first pair of reading glasses, which I did not need. He was a romantic figure, mostly because he had studied French and adored the difficult r’s of that language. He was tall and good-looking and not very truthful. He was corrupted by an uncertain nature and no one…

To become a sacerdotal offering, very much like those pale schoolteachers in Latin America, men from the poor villages, sweating in their black suits and white shirts, receiving and giving a peculiar list of punishments in their visionary calling.

The apotheosis of a local teaching certificate, a celestial and long-delayed reward for girls.

“Shame is inventive,” Nietzsche said. And that is scarcely the half of it. From shame I have paid attention to clothes, shoes, rings, watches, accents, teeth, points of deportment, turns of speech. The men on the train are wearing clothes which, made for no season, are therefore always unseasonable…