One of Sade's singularities is that he offers an absolutely sexualised view of the world, a sexualisation that permeates everything, much as his atheism does and, since he is not a religious man but a...
I saw before me a mansion in the Gothic style, all ivied over, and, above the turrets, floated a fingernail moon with a star in its arms.
Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a willfully organic...
By the end of the affair, she had acquired so much miserable information about men and women she almost decided to give up relationships for good.
But one story in this book, 'How a Husband Weaned His Wife from Fairy Tales', shows just how much fairy stories could change a woman's desires, and how much a man might fear that change, would go to a...
At this time, the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century, had a plebiscite been taken amongst all the inhabitants of the world, by far the great number of them, occupied as they w...
That is what I'm looking forward to the most, practical learning. I want to be a registered nurse so getting to talk to people who already work in those jobs can really teach me what to expect when I...
What big eyes you have. Eyes of an incomparable luminosity, the numinous phosphorescence of the eyes of lycanthropes. The gelid green of your eyes fixes my reflective face; It is a preservative, like...
There were scarcely any of those little, what you might call personal touches to his personality, as if his habit of suspending belief extended even unto his own being. I say he had a propensity for '...
The waxen fingers of the Countess, fingers of a holy image, turn up the card called L'Amoureux. Never, never before… never before has the Countess cast herself a fate involving L'Amoureux. She shakes,...
The dead know something we don’t, although they keep it to themselves.
She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves.
I watched with the furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly
I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason.
For now my skin was my sole capital in the world and today I'd make my first investment.
Below me, in spreading, concentric circles, like those a fish makes when it rises in still water, spun round the lower tiers; above me arched the black sky pierced by the gas jets of the stars.
A draught made the flames of the candles dance and the air grew thick with the smell of hot wax. Marianne's eyes had grown more and more accustomed to the candlelight and she made out knobs and swags...
Step between the gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. They are grey as famine, they...
Ruin had been the original blueprint and men and women had lived here only in a necessary but intermediate stage of the execution of the grand design
He herself will serve them coffee in tiny, cracked cups of precious porcelain and little sugar cakes. The hobbledehoys sit with a spilling cup in one hand and a biscuit in the other, gaping at the bea...