It was the fault of the wedding-dress night, when she married the shadows and the world ended.
For Sade, all tenderness is false, a deceit, a trap; all pleasure contains within itself the seeds of atrocities; all beds are minefields.
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.
Women do not normally fuck in the active sense. They are fucked in the passive tense and hence automatically fucked-up, done over, undone.
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...
The demands of ritual are always stronger than those of reason.
Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!
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...
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...
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.
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
Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women.
I’ve changed a lot since 1969, and so has the world; I’m more benign, the world is far bleaker, and the people in would now be edging nervously up to the middle age they thought could never happen, t...
It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.
Herşeye karşın onun kişiliğinde hâlâ eksik kalmış birşeyler vardı. Mobilyalı olarak kiraya verilmiş bir eve benziyordu. [sf 11]
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...
I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.
Destruction is only another aspect of being.
When he combs his hair that is the colour of dead leaves, dead leaves fall out of it; they rustle and drift to the ground as though he were a tree and he can stand as still as a tree, when he wants th...