Grace Slick Quotes

No matter how big or soft or warm your bed is, you still have to get out of it.

Feed your head" means read a book.

Through literacy you can begin to see the universe. Through music, you can reach anybody. Between the two, there is you, unstoppable.

When will my country die for me?

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception. Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight. The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He called a slick line and wore a world-class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab. Jack got whacked at the optimum moment to assure his sainthood. Lies continue to swirl around his eternal flame. It's time to dislodge his urn and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall. They were rouge cops and shakedown artist. They were wiretappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers. Had one second of their lives deviated off course, American History would not exist as we know it. It's time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define there time. Here's to them.

But the things that make a woman feel good inside and out—and make those around her feel good and happy to be with her—are not for sale. Things like kindness, self-discipline, purpose, humility, grace, confidence, hospitality, and peace cannot be marketed in a slick magazine ad or in a movie.

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead And the white knight is talking backwards And the red queen's off with her head Remember what the dormouse said Feed your head, feed your head

Remember what the Dormouse said, Feed Your Head!

the things that make a woman feel good inside and out—and make those around her feel good and happy to be with her—are not for sale. Things like kindness, self-discipline, purpose, humility, grace, confidence, hospitality, and peace cannot be marketed in a slick magazine ad or in a movie.

It's all going the way it's supposed to be going Otherwise, it would be going some other way.” —SANDY HARPER, 1978

mantel and a Rolls in the garage, but your old man still wouldn't know a clitoris from a junk bond if you had the guts to show him your twat in the first place.

Whatever you say, Grace," Kitty said, thrusting mugs of wine into everyone's hands. "Five children live in this house and it's eight years before the oldest one moves out. If I don't get some adult conversation tonight I'm going to blow my brains out." "Hear, hear," Maryellen said. "Three girls: seven, five, and four." "Four is such a lovely age," Slick cooed. "Is it?" Maryellen asked, eyes narrowing.

Joffrey called out, “Dog!” Sandor Clegane seemed to take form out of the night, so quickly did he appear. He had exchanged his armor for a red woolen tunic with a leather dog’s head sewn on the front. The light of the torches made his burned face shine a dull red. “Yes, Your Grace?” he said. “Take my betrothed back to the castle, and see that no harm befalls her,” the prince told him brusquely. And without even a word of farewell, Joffrey strode off, leaving her there. Sansa could feel the Hound watching her. “Did you think Joff was going to take you himself?” He laughed. He had a laugh like the snarling of dogs in a pit. “Small chance of that.” He pulled her unresisting to her feet. “Come, you’re not the only one needs sleep. I’ve drunk too much, and I may need to kill my brother tomorrow.” He laughed again. He was mocking her, she realized. “No one could withstand him,” she managed at last, proud of herself. It was no lie. Sandor Clegane stopped suddenly in the middle of a dark and empty field. She had no choice but to stop beside him. “Some septa trained you well. You’re like one of those birds from the Summer Isles, aren’t you? A pretty little talking -bird, repeating all the pretty little words they taught you to recite.” “ Take your look.” His fingers held her jaw as hard as an iron trap. His eyes watched hers. Drunken eyes, sullen with anger. She had to look. The right side of his face was gaunt, with sharp cheekbones and a grey eye beneath a heavy brow. His nose was large and hooked, his hair thin, dark. He wore it long and brushed it sideways, because no hair grew on the other side of that face. The left side of his face was a ruin. His ear had been burned away; there was nothing left but a hole. His eye was still good, but all around it was a twisted mass of scar, slick black flesh hard as leather, pocked with craters and fissured by deep cracks.

There is no pain - just travel. On her knees, she stays still as a supplicant ready for communion. It is very quiet. All of a sudden there is no hurry. There will be time for everything. For the breezes that blow and for the rainwater drying in the gutters, for Maury to find a place of safety in the world, for Malcolm to come back from the dead and ask her about birds and jets. For the big things too, things like beauty and vengeance and honor and righteousness and the grace of God and the slow spilling of the earth from day to night and back to day again. It is spread out before her, compressed into one single moment. She will be able to see it all -- if she can keep her sleepy eyes open. It's like a dream where she is. Like a dream where you find yourself underwater and you are panicked for a moment until you realize you no longer need to breathe, and you can stay under the surface forever. She feels her body falling sideways to the ground. It happens slow - and she expects a crash that never comes because her mind is jumping and it doesn't know which way is up anymore, like the moon above her and the fish below her and her in between floating, like on the surface of the river, floating between sea and sky, the world all skin, all meniscus, and she a part of it too. Moses Todd told her if you lean over the rail at Niagara Falls it takes your breath away, like turning yourself inside out -- and Lee the hunter told her that one time people used to stuff themselves in barrels and ride over the edge. And she is there too, floating out over the edge of the falls, the roar of the water so deafening it's like hearing nothing at all, like pillows in your ears, and the water exactly the temperature of your skin, like you are falling and the water is falling, and the water is just more of you, like everything is just more of you, just different configurations of the things that make you up. She is there, and she's sailing out and down over the falls, down and down, and it takes a long time because the falls are one of God's great mysteries and so high they are higher than any building, and so she is held there, spinning in the air, her eyes closed because she's spinning on the inside too, down and down. She wonders if she will ever hit the bottom, wonders will the splash ever come. Maybe not - because God is a slick god, and he knows things about infinities. Infinities are warm places that never end. And they aren't about good and evil, they're just peaceful-like and calm, and they're where all travelers go eventually, and they are round everywhere you look because you can't have any edges in infinities. And also they make forever seem like an okay thing.

Cersei cupped the other woman’s breast. Softly at first, hardly touching, feeling the warmth of it beneath her palm, the skin as smooth as satin. She gave it a gentle squeeze, then ran her thumbnail lightly across the big dark nipple, back and forth and back and forth until she felt it stiffen. When she glanced up, Taena’s eyes were open. “Does that feel good?” she asked. “Yes,” said Lady Merryweather. “And this?” Cersei pinched the nipple now, puling on it hard, twisting it between her fingers. The Myrish woman gave a gasp of pain. “You’re hurting me.” “It’s just the wine. I had a flagon with my supper, and another with the widow Stokeworth. I had to drink to keep her calm.” She twisted Taena’s other nipple too, puling until the other woman gasped. “I am the queen. I mean to claim my rights.” “Do what you wil.” Taena’s hair was as black as Robert’s, even down between her legs, and when Cersei touched her there she found her hair al sopping wet, where Robert’s had been coarse and dry. “Please,” the Myrish woman said, “go on, my queen. Do as you wil with me. I’m yours.” But it was no good. She could not feel it, whatever Robert felt on the nights he took her. There was no pleasure in it, not for her. For Taena, yes. Her nipples were two black diamonds, her sex slick and steamy. Robert would have loved you, for an hour. The queen slid a finger into that Myrish swamp, then another, moving them in and out, but once he spent himself inside you, he would have been hard-pressed to recal your name. She wanted to see if it would be as easy with a woman as it had always been with Robert. Ten thousand of your children perished in my palm, Your Grace, she thought, slipping a third finger into Myr. Whilst you snored, I would lick your sons of my face and fingers one by one, al those pale sticky princes. You claimed your rights, my lord, but in the darkness I would eat your heirs. Taena gave a shudder. She gasped some words in a foreign tongue, then shuddered again and arched her back and screamed. She sounds as if she is being gored, the queen thought. For a moment she let herself imagine that her fingers were a bore’s tusks, ripping the Myrish woman apart from groin to throat. It was stil no good. It had never been any good with anyone but Jaime. When she tried to take her hand away, Taena caught it and kissed her fingers. “Sweet queen, how shal I pleasure you?” She slid her hand down Cersei’s side and touched her sex. “Tel me what you would have of me, my love.

A paradisiacal lagoon lay below them. The water was an unbelievable, unreal turquoise, its surface so still that every feature of the bottom could be admired in magnified detail: colorful pebbles, bright red kelp, fish as pretty and colorful as the jungle birds. A waterfall on the far side fell softly from a height of at least twenty feet. A triple rainbow graced its frothy bottom. Large boulders stuck out of the water at seemingly random intervals, black and sun-warmed and extremely inviting, like they had been placed there on purpose by some ancient giant. And on these were the mermaids. Wendy gasped at their beauty. Their tails were all colors of the rainbow, somehow managing not to look tawdry or clownish. Deep royal blue, glittery emerald green, coral red, anemone purple. Slick and wet and as beautifully real as the salmon Wendy's father had once caught on holiday in Scotland. Shining and voluptuously alive. The mermaids were rather scandalously naked except for a few who wore carefully placed shells and starfish, although their hair did afford some measure of decorum as it trailed down their torsos. Their locks were long and thick and sinuous and mostly the same shades as their tails. Some had very tightly coiled curls, some had braids. Some had decorated their tresses with limpets and bright hibiscus flowers. Their "human" skins were familiar tones: dark brown to pale white, pink and beige and golden and everything in between. Their eyes were also familiar eye colors but strangely clear and flat. Either depthless or extremely shallow depending on how one stared. They sang, they brushed their hair, they played in the water. In short, they did everything mythical and magical mermaids were supposed to do, laughing and splashing as they did. "Oh!" Wendy whispered. "They're-" And then she stopped. Tinker Bell was giving her a funny look. An unhappy funny look. The mermaids were beautiful. Indescribably, perfectly beautiful. They glowed and were radiant and seemed to suck up every ray of sun and sparkle of water; Wendy found she had no interest looking anywhere else.

Postmoderns will not swallow ideology just because someone said it tastes good. Cynicism is often their obstacle, but also it protects their hearts from further betrayal. They can sniff a sham a mile away. Postmoderns...hunger for community and justice, humility and anticonsumerism. They don't like slick. They don't trust a leader without a limp. Since they question everything, they require safe spiritual environments where struggles are welcomed and discussed...They must be allowed to wrestle without being shamed, or they'll default to their open-armed peers and we will lose them.

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception. Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight. The real Trinity of Camelot was Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. Jack Kennedy was the mythological front man for a particularly juicy slice of our history. He called a slick line and wore a world-class haircut. He was Bill Clinton minus pervasive media scrutiny and a few rolls of flab. Jack got whacked at the optimum moment to assure his sainthood. Lies continue to swirl around his eternal flame. It's time to dislodge his urn and cast light on a few men who attended his ascent and facilitated his fall. They were rouge cops and shakedown artists. They were wiretappers and soldiers of fortune and faggot lounge entertainers. Had one second of their lives deviated off course, American History would not exist as we know it. It's time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time. Here's to them.

For the mob is a congregation of compulsions. It does not matter who or what squats upon the altar: Robespierre, Beelzebub, Mussolini, Belial, any political or social savior with the sibilant speech and the slick tongue, hissing out every other word with its suffix -ism. The people will be saved not by the grace of God, not by any act of faith, hope, or charity. They will be saved because they belong to the right mob. They think they have pulled the lever of righteousness, but they are themselves the levers that are pulled. A mob is not a great cloud of witnesses. It is not a gathering of friends for a wedding feast. It is a herd of enemies who have fused their enmity with the cause, whereof they are the willing effects. Witness the goings-on when a politician dies. No one, in Life Under Compulsion, says to himself, “The fearful reckoning he meets may be mine, soon.” They turn the funeral into a political event. They must: they are marionettes and they will dance. They look over the shoulder to see who gets the prime time for the moist eye and the hitch in the voice.

Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette! But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky. Her skin was blue, her blood was red. She broke over an iron gate, crimping it on impact, and there she hung, impossibly arched, graceful as a temple dancer swooning on a lover’s arm. One slick finial anchored her in place. Its point, protruding from her sternum, glittered like a brooch. She fluttered briefly as her ghost shook loose, and torch ginger buds rained out of her long hair. Later, they would say these had been hummingbird hearts and not blossoms at all. They would say she hadn’t shed blood but wept it. That she was lewd, tonguing her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that she vomited a serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would say a flock of moths came, frantic, and tried to lift her away. That was true. Only that. They hadn’t a prayer, though. The moths were no bigger than the startled mouths of children, and even dozens together could only pluck at the strands of her darkening hair until their wings sagged, sodden with her blood. They were purled away with the blossoms as a grit-choked gust came blasting down the street. The earth heaved underfoot. The sky spun on its axis. A queer brilliance lanced through billowing smoke, and the people of Weep had to squint against it. Blowing grit and hot light and the stink of saltpeter. There had been an explosion. They might have died, all and easily, but only this girl had, shaken from some pocket of the sky. Her feet were bare, her mouth stained damson. Her pockets were all full of plums. She was young and lovely and surprised and dead. She was also blue. Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings, or a spring—not summer—sky.

On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky. Her skin was blue, her blood was red. She broke over an iron gate, crimping it on impact, and there she hung, impossibly arched, graceful as a temple dancer swooning on a lover’s arm. One slick finial anchored her in place. Its point, protruding from her sternum, glittered like a brooch. She fluttered briefly as her ghost shook loose, and torch ginger buds rained out of her long hair. Later, they would say these had been hummingbird hearts and not blossoms at all. They would say she hadn’t shed blood but wept it. That she was lewd, tonguing her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that she vomited a serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would say a flock of moths came, frantic, and tried to lift her away. That was true. Only that. They hadn’t a prayer, though. The moths were no bigger than the startled mouths of children, and even dozens together could only pluck at the strands of her darkening hair until their wings sagged, sodden with her blood. They were purled away with the blossoms as a grit-choked gust came blasting down the street. The earth heaved underfoot. The sky spun on its axis. A queer brilliance lanced through billowing smoke, and the people of Weep had to squint against it. Blowing grit and hot light and the stink of saltpeter. There had been an explosion. They might have died, all and easily, but only this girl had, shaken from some pocket of the sky. Her feet were bare, her mouth stained damson. Her pockets were all full of plums. She was young and lovely and surprised and dead. She was also blue. Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings, or a spring—not summer—sky. Someone screamed. The scream drew others. The others screamed, too, not because a girl was dead, but because the girl was blue, and this meant something in the city of Weep. Even after the sky stopped reeling, and the earth settled, and the last fume spluttered from the blast site and dispersed, the screams went on, feeding themselves from voice to voice, a virus of the air. The blue girl’s ghost gathered itself and perched, bereft, upon the spearpoint-tip of the projecting finial, just an inch above her own still chest. Gasping in shock, she tilted back her invisible head and gazed, mournfully, up. The screams went on and on. And across the city, atop a monolithic wedge of seamless, mirror-smooth metal, a statue stirred, as though awakened by the tumult, and slowly lifted its great horned head.

ANNIE LEIBOVITZ’S FIRST cover shoot was Grace Slick.

The following is in no way a death wish. I like life just fine, but when the time comes, my favorite way of dying would be by … EXPLOSION—all over white walls!

I've had my allotment of liquor — and probably twenty other people's

TO FIRST-GENERATION BARBIE OWNERS, OF WHICH I WAS one, Barbie was a revelation. She didn't teach us to nurture, like our clinging, dependent Betsy Wetsys and Chatty Cathys. She taught us independence. Barbie was her own woman. She could invent herself with a costume change: sing a solo in the spotlight one minute, pilot a starship the next. She was Grace Slick and Sally Ride, Marie Osmond and Marie Curie. She was all that we could be and—if you calculate what at human scale would translate to a thirty-nine-inch bust—more than we could be. And certainly more than we were . . . at six and seven and eight when she appeared and sank her jungle-red

Washington isn’t a nest of vipers. Really. It’s a city of mostly well-intentioned people who, like the rest of us, sometimes cut corners out of expedience, self-interest, or, quite possibly, the greater good. It’s a city defined not by its cardinal sins, but by its venal ones. For every bug-eyed backbencher who insists Mexican immigrants are all al-Qaeda sleeper agents, or every slick lobbyist clamoring to sign an energy company that drenched half of Puget Sound in unrefined crude, there are thousands of far more relatable individuals committing much less conspicuous, and more ethically muddled, offenses: the congressman who votes for a discriminatory bill that won’t go anywhere to earn political capital so he or she can defeat their challenger who would bring a much more harmful agenda to Washington; the reporter who holds off on a story about a senator’s special interest fundraiser to stay in the lawmaker’s good graces for a larger piece about malfeasance among congressional leadership; the political staffer who holds their tongue when a colleague cashes out at a lobbying firm because they, too, might one day want to stop working eighty hours a week while making $45,000 a year. All

Sorry Slick, but I have news about Casanova. You remember, the case we’re working? The reason that you’re here?” Dylan tried to keep it light, but inside he was seething.

Remember what the dormouse said

He loved the idea of this country (theory and practice often being diametrically opposed), but the manner in which the original documents of freedom had been mangled to steer corporate/military interests drove him close to clinically insane. I believe it was grief for a nation that finally killed him.

It's the individual's specific way of perceiving the world that swings the whole game in a different direction.

Insignificant events can take on monumental proportions when your head is full of practically nothing.

there'll always be people who are afraid of living and afraid of dying. And there are always more of them than there are risk-takers, the people who bring innovation into every area, with or without drugs.

Rohan was battling invisible foes, wielding the large, lancelike weapon she had seen in his hand that first night in the great hall. His long hair flowed around his shoulders, wetted with the sweat that streamed from him and made his body gleam with rippling, raw power. He was bare-chested, wearing only loose black trousers that draped his compact buttocks and muscled thighs gracefully. His bare feet were silent on the flagstones as he lunged, leaped, and spun about, the torchlight flashing crimson on his long, wicked blade. Kate watched, riveted by the play of shadows and gold torchlight that slid over his sweat-slicked body, gliding across the sleekly muscled contours of his back and massive shoulders, his powerful chest and chiseled abdomen as he thrust, swung, jabbed, then spiraled up to parry an imaginary blow, only to gouge again with precision perfectly balanced with killing force. His blade sliced through the air with naught but a deadly whisper, each slashing arc of his weapon, like his honed body, under his exquisite control. In constant motion, he wove through the changing patterns of his regime with a beautiful---an almost otherworldly---prowess, a creature of elegant savagery. He attacked again with a low war cry, but then suddenly went motionless, standing in a sure-footed stance below her, his chest heaving. Slowly, he looked up, as though he had felt her there. Kate found herself looking into the eyes of a predator; she held absolutely still.

Don’t,” I tell her. “Don’t call me Sir. I can’t be your Dom right now.” “Then what are you?” I tease Grace’s opening, wetting my fingers with her arousal. She whimpers as I spread that slickness over her clit. “I’m the man who’s been falling in love with you since day one.

He was dangerous. And difficult. And he was all mine. Sometimes in the morning, when he worked in the gym one floor below, I’d stand by the gym’s glass wall for a few minutes before I came in to spar. I’d watch him lift dumbbells or do dips with the weights attached to his belt, powerful muscles bulging and relaxing with controlled exertion, while the bars creaked under his weight and sweat slicked his short blond hair and skin until it glowed. Watching him never failed to send a slow insistent heat through me. He wasn’t working out now. He was standing there in sweatpants and a blue T-shirt, carrying some sort of bottle, and I was ready to jump his bones. I could picture him above me in the bed. At least it didn’t show on my face. I had to have some dignity left. I’d missed him so much, it almost hurt. It started the moment I left the Keep and nagged at me all day. Every day I had to fight with myself to keep from making up bullshit reasons to call the Keep so I could hear his voice. My only saving grace was that Curran wasn’t handling this whole mating thing any better. Yesterday he’d called me at the office claiming that he couldn’t find his socks. We talked for two hours.

doubled over and an old bobble-hat was hanging down between his knees.  Jamie took another look to see if he was okay, and spotted an empty vodka bottle between his heels against the curb.  She sighed and dragged her eyes back to the man and woman sitting by the fence. They looked up at Roper and Jamie and stopped talking.  As they drew closer the pair got up and walked away quickly without another word, keen to avoid any questions that might have been directed at them. Jamie and Roper didn’t bother calling out, and neither were prepared to chase them down.  They were both in their forties, and neither of them were Grace.  Roper paused at the fence and put his foot on it, craning his neck to see under the bridge beyond.  Long green tendrils looped their way down the bank, the jagged bramble leaves twisting gently in the autumn air.  The sky overhead had turned turbulent and grey, bruised raw by the incoming winter.  Jamie shivered and stepped past Roper, who didn’t seem inclined to make his way onto the loose bank in his old slick-bottom Chelsea boots. Jamie didn’t have that trepidation. She looked back as she stepped over the stained blanket, her deeply-teased heel crunching in the loose stone.  Roper was grimacing, staring down at the bridge and the tents under it.  Jamie could see by the look on his face that he was hoping she’d not ask him to follow. Sounds of conversation were echoing up and a thin blanket of smoke was clinging to the girders above. Someone was warming themselves. Some faces had already appeared in the openings to the little makeshift huts and shelters, peering out at the two newcomers — at the two outsiders.

Emma had had lots of time since then to research true narcissism and now understood how slickly a person could be fooled by one. Narcissists, according to what she’d learned, were charming, engaging, and as long as the narcissist’s needs and desires were put first, above all else, things could go well in a relationship. Tad had groomed and manipulated her from the beginning to please him. She was pretty, dressed and behaved gracefully, which all served him. She adored him and fell into feeding his ego

I’m baking a cake. I’m making a Taste Food Cake just for taste, one with white crust with flecks of butter, a smallish one, the dimensions of a roller rink, single level with chewy sponge and jelly gleaming in its own red carpet inside… We like sucking at the sides of cakes, siphoning off the reserves of cream and spitting it out on the pavement. We lap at the trimmings. Suck on the sugar-slicked decorations and swallow the jelly from between layers of chewy cream…