“For the first time, her love for Edward was associated with a definable physical sensation, as irrefutable as vertigo. Before, she had known only a comforting broth of warm emotions, a thick winter blanket of kindness and trust. That has always seemed enough, an achievement in itself. Now here at last were the beginnings of desire, precise and alien, but clearly her own; and beyond, as though suspended above and behind her, just out of sight, was relief that she was just like everyone else. When she was a late-developing fourteen, in despair that all her friends had breasts while she still resembled a giant nine-year-old, she had a similar moment of revelation in front of the mirror the evening she first discerned and probed a novel tight swelling around her nipples. If her mother had not been preparing her Spinoza lecture on the floor below, Florence would have shouted in delight. It was undeniable: she was not a separate subspecies of the human race. In triumph, she belonged among the generality.”

                     --Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach, 2007

“SPARE ME THE HOMILIES ABOUT THE POOR UNFORTUNATE JUNKIES I’VE DOOMED. THEY’RE ANTS AND ANTS GET STEPPED ON. THE STRONG SURVIVE. MEN LIKE ME SURVIVE. FEW MODERN-DAY KNIGHTS SURVIVE. PRECIOUS FEW. BECAUSE WHEN YOU STAND WITH ANTS—YOU SHARE THEIR FATE!”

                     --Tony Isabella, LUKE CAGE, POWER MAN, Vol. 1, No. 20, 
                            "How Like a Serpent's Tooth..." 1974