At first, what mattered was the sparky contents of Sontag’s head; by the end she was best known for the way she wore her hair – that saturnine battle helmet of dyed black, with a single stripe left white at the temple like a Frankensteinian lighting bolt of intellect.

The kind sorrowful blue eyes looked at me for a moment with the prescient sadness of a coming and a long farewell.

Have a heart and be lenient with him; he's only a child.

It befriended a blind priest, and for a time was happy, until it accidentally poisoned him with its weird, venomous footspur.