“As his dark closet shows, Bluebeard was a collector at heart, and even after dispatching a wife, could not let her fully depart.”

“As Atwood concludes after a random and informal sampling, men and women differ markedly in the 'scope of their threatenability': 'Why do men feel threatened by woman?' I asked a male friend of mine....'[M]en are bigger, most of the time...and they have on the average a lot more money and power.' 'They're afraid women will laugh at them,' he said. 'Undercut their world view.' Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, 'Why do women feel threatened by men?' 'They're afraid of being killed,' they said'.”

“Power,' as the sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda writes, 'enters the picture in two ways': the first entails constructing and legitimizing the moral system itself; the second, in enforcing it. In this view, 'deviants are those who simply do not have enough power to prevent others from defining them as such'.”

“There are four on whose pots the Holy One, blessed he, knocked, only to find them filled with piss, and these are they: Adam, Cain, the wicked Balaam, and Hezekiah."Again, an abrupt transposition from the divine to the domestic, from upper to lowly spheres, occurs in the midrash. The homely image of the Holy One knocking on pots apparently derives from the practice of tapping on a clay or earthen pot to hear its ring in order to decide if it is worthy of holding wine. In current Hebrew usage, the expression 'to assess or gauge someone's pot' still denotes taking in the measure of a person's character. From Adam's answer to God, we learn that he turned out to be a pisspot.”

“I am sending back the keythat let me into bluebeard's study; because he would make love to meI am sending back the key;in his eye's darkroom I can seemy X-rayed heart, dissected body:I am sending back the keythat let me into bluebeard s study.”

“I think there must have been some other girl printed somewhere in his heart, for he was a man of love and his wife was not a woman to show her feelings.”

“Next thing Driggs knew, Lex was rummaging around in the closet. 'Are you looking for your sanity?' he called after her. 'Because I do believe it showed itself out a while ago.”