Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen

But here is what you need to understand - here is why you are in danger. Here is why you must speak, and why you must not allow us to speak for you. Because history is an act of continuous collective imagining, and the perception of truth is a constant, unending negotiation, with others, and with oneself when one is alone.

One ought to pretend that there is still hope, in this late season, for astonishment.

. . . calamity comes for every one of us, and assumes the shape that will be sure to hurt us most.

. . . but what they were all waiting for, none could say; nor could one say whether they were all waiting for the same thing, or whether each was waiting for something entirely different.

But also: nightmares. The most delicious nightmares, the kind that one has only after the wall between the mundane and the magical is breached directly before one's eyes; nightmares that make you smile as you shiver in your sleep.

She was not a victim, for being a victim entails activities and duties that she felt no obligation to perform. It means that people who come across you in the street will look at with pity in their eyes, and smug thankfulness in their own good fortune will lie behind that pity. In the moment they will conveniently forget their own secret tragedies; they will not realize that they are no more fortunate than you are, that calamity comes for every one of us, and assumes the shape that will be sure to hurt us most.

It was undeniably wonderful to witness an acknowledgment of the power that lay in your mind and in your hands, from someone who did not hold that power.

[...] he had found in the past that gathering too many intellectuals in the same room tended to aggravate all their myriad insecurities, and turn discourse into combat.

Here is why you must speak, and why you must not allow us to speak for you. Because history is an act of continuous collective imagining, and the perception of truth is a constant, unending negotiation, with others, and with oneself when one is alone.

I sometimes consider that the only difference between a hoax and an article of faith is the number of people who profess belief in it.

But I think - and I say this not to salve my own feelings, but because I have truly come to believe it - that something more complex goes on in the mind of those who we say are "fooled". That there is an additional self-deception, a self victimization. The dupe become both robber and robbed, both living in the same mind, the one constantly deceiving the other. Because something profound must happen in the mind to convince a man to distrust the common sense acquired over decades, not just once, but continuously.

English gin is a drink for people who think a sin must always be accompanied by its penance.

I cannot say that I wonder if I did the right thing, because whichever version of the world I chose to live in, the facts would alter themselves so that I did.

And I will tell you this about God--that despite his presumed omnipresence he often arrives in the company of men; that men fear to interpret the world on their own authority when they are aware of his presence, because his senses are complete and perfect and his experiences are unlimited; that the standards for proof are much higher when God is involved, especially proof of life, or of what goes on inside a woman's body; that weighed against God's displeasure, or against a man's feeling that God is displeased by his actions, the life of one woman is no great thing.

The truth of the matter. Is it a thing that exists outside of our minds, waiting for us to perceive it and know it as true? Or is truth a thing that collectively resides within the minds of all men, a matter of consensus, subject to debate, subject to alteration? The world outside our minds neither true nor false, but merely there?