He is a carnival figure made of papier mâché and crêpe hair; and yet he has the Devil’s knack at cards.
She found it made things easier if she dramatised them. Or melodramatised them. It was easier, for example, to face the fact of Uncle Philip if she saw him as a character in a film, possibly played by...
Justine's virtue, in action, is the liberal lie in action, a good heart and an inadequate methodology.
jThe notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.
It was a sensitive and musical dog.
A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster. Her freedom will be a condition of personal privilege that deprives those on which she exercises it of her own freedom. The most extreme kind of th...
Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
Yet wild things have a far more rational fear of us than is ours of them...
The magnificence of such objects hardly pertains to the human. They live only in a world of icons and there they participate in rituals which transmute life itself to a series of grand gestures, as mo...
Sade's manicheistic dualism sees the world as irredeemably evil; vice must always prosper, virtue always despair. There is no hope for us as we are now.[...]Sade's vision is utterly without transcende...
I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs!
I can no longer tell the difference between memory and dream. They share the same quality of wishful thinking.
He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance.
Sometimes it was possible for me to believe he had practised an enchantment upon me, as foxes in this country may, for, here, a fox can masquerade as human and at the best of times the high cheekbones...
Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with.
She looks wonderful, but she doesn't look right.
I fall to the toilette of my hinder parts, my favourite stance when contemplating the ways of the world.
Eldritch ways,
Watching a film was like being a voyeur, living vicariously.
The notion of a natural propensity for vice is essential to Sadeian psychology; vice is innate, as is virtue, if social conditions are unalterable. This straitjacket psychology relates his fiction dir...