The Dear Idiot

Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (2001)

“In Campanella’s world, where ‘death of simple things is a transformation into something else’, a loss of ‘human consciousness and of the living spirit, but not of the obtuse, material, and everyday’, death signifies a change of state and decomposition, a mutation of form into a sensuous mobility of matter. Worms are but a projection of man, of his inside shape, and the fine, shiny caterpillars may have something human about them and appear anthropomorphic. […] An ambivalent monster, a ‘wicked worm’ like the Prince of Darkness, the rebel and fallen angel, or ‘worms/born to make the angelic butterfly’, the earthworm and the caterpillar are man’s other face, or, better, his image. ‘What are all men’, wondered St. Augustine, ‘born of flesh, if not worms?’ Fear of worms is in the last analysis fear of oneself. These creatures, like mankind, were born of decay; man from fetid sperm, from stale blood, fed in the womb by the same putrid blood that also produced snakes; worms of rotting blood and decomposing flesh. The difference was only superficial.”

Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn (2006) / The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, Jennifer Lynch (1990)

—  Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians,  Richard Sugg.

“Without knowing it, I had fallen in love with him. And we all know love is a deceptive glass that can make even a monster appear fascinating.”

“The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.”