Sorry, can't come to the phone right now! The Akashic Records aren't going to sort themselves. Leave a message after the tone, and I'll get back to you at a better narrativistic interval!
— Angela Carter, from The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, c. 1978.
In many ways, women are death’s natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women “give birth astride of a grave.”
— Caitlin Doughty, from Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory