"But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags." (Isaiah 64:6)

"I am a man of unclean lips." (Isaiah 6:5)

"In order to understand, after that first dietary apportionment, the introduction of meat diet, one must assume a cataclysm- for instance, a violation of divine rule and subsequent punishment. It is indeed only after the Flood that authorization is granted to eat "every moving thing that liveth." (Genesis 9:3) Far from being a reward, such permission is accompanied by an acknowledgment of essential evil, and it includes a negative, incriminating connotation with respect to man: "For the imagination of man's heart is evil." (Genesis 8:21)." Kristeva, 96

"Evocation of the maternal body and childbirth induces the image of birth as a violent act of expulsion through which the nascent body tears itself away from the matter of maternal insides. Now, the skin apparently never ceases to bear the traces of such matter...The body must bear no trace of its debt to nature; it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic." Kristeva, 101-2

"If abomination is the lining of my symbolic being, "I" am therefore heterogeneous, pure and impure, and as such always potentially condemnable...The system of abominations sets in motion the persecuting machine in which I assume the place of the victim in order to justify the purification that will separate me from that place as it will from any other, from all others. Mother and death, both abominated, abjected, slyly building a victimizing and persecuting machine at the cost of which I become the subject of the Symbolic as well as Other of the Abject." Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p 112