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...
The demands of ritual are always stronger than those of reason.
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...
For Sade, all tenderness is false, a deceit, a trap; all pleasure contains within itself the seeds of atrocities; all beds are minefields.
All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be seen or touched
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...
The earth turned on the pivot of her mouth.
Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with.
It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.
Erl-King lives
Destruction is only another aspect of being.
But there is no mysterious virtue in Justine's suffering. The martyrdom of this Christ-figure is absolutely useless; she is a gratuitous victim. And if there is no virtue in her suffering, then there...
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
Women do not normally fuck in the active sense. They are fucked in the passive tense and hence automatically fucked-up, done over, undone.
They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When they embraced each other’s phantoms, each in his separate privacy has savoured the most refined of plea...
Then, if I am lucky enough to be taken with such poetic pseudo-seriousness, my nether mouth may be acknowledged as one capable of speech – were there not, of old, divinatory priestesses, female oracle...
It was the fault of the wedding-dress night, when she married the shadows and the world ended.
I am happy only in that I am a monster.
But the Countess herself is indifferent to her own weird authority. Shebelieves that, by ignoring it, she can abnegate it. More than anything, shewould like to be human; but she does not know if that...
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.