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.
I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.
The child's laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown.
The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.
Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.
I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.
I desire therefore I exist.
The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.
Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!
I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.
Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been
Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.
We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.
Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.
There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.
It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.
His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.
The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.
Love is desire sustained by unfulfilment.
They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.
Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.
I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.
Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.
One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.
Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.
She stood lost in eternity... watching the immense sky...
The clown may be the source of mirth, but - who shall make the clown laugh?
This lack of imagination gives his heroism to the hero.
For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.
What would the daughters of the rich do with themselves if the poor ceased to exist?
His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist.
Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation.
I don't begrudge you my company, my darling. We must all make do with what rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.
Wars are facts we cannot fuck away, Perry; nor laugh away, either.
I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.
Your thin white face, chérie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a connoisseur could detect.
Ordered me a sky from a florist
Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.
And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.
The lovely Hazard girls', they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they'd frighten little children.
Proposition one: time is a man, space is a woman.
We must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.
Reason cannot produce the poetry disorder does.
Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.
A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.
A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.
The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.
How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?
Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with
In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force
Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
...for nothing is more boring than being forced to play.
When I’d first loved him, I wanted to take him apart, as a child dismembers a clockwork toy, to comprehend the inscrutable mechanics of its interior.” -flesh and the mirror
She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.
I drew the curtains to conceal the sight of my father's farewell; my spite was sharp as broken glass.
Then she broke down and cried onto the flowery wrapping paper. Melanie put her arms around the poor, thin body. What is Aunt Margaret made of? Birdbones and tissue paper. spun glass and straw.
Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I'll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say.
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(And could love free me from the shadows? Can a caged bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?)
Curiosity is the most fleeting of pleasures; the moment is satisfied, it ceases to exist and it always proves very, very expensive.
And it was sad music fit to make you cut your throat.
Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn.
Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride.
At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.
Midnight, and the clock strikes. It is Christmas Day, the werewolves birthday, the door of the solstice still wide enough open to let them all slink through.
She had given herself to the world in her entirety and then found nothing was left
Degredation is the subtlest drug, the most insinuating. But they could do nothing to me I had not already imagined.
How pleased I was to see I strick the Beast to the heart.
See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.
I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.
The earth turned on the pivot of her mouth.
What is Aunt Margaret made of? Bird bones and tissue paper, spun glass and straw.
Time was his servant, too; it would trap me, here, in a night that would last until he came back to me, like a black sun on a hopeless morning.
We must all make do with what rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.
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.
Despair is the constant companion of the clown.
They say there's an ointment the Devil gives you that turns you into a wolf the minute you rub it on.
Marianne had sharp, cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her.
I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.
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.
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
Have you ever stared stark failure in the face, young man? The trick is, to outstare it!
The end of exile is the end of being.
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
We keep the wolves outside by living well.
Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which buds lovers like roses.
I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness.
But needs must when the devil drives.
This is some kind of heretical, possibly Manichean version of neo-Platonic Roscicrucianism, thinks I to myself; tread carefully, girlie!
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.
She was feeling supernatural tonight. She wanted to EAT diamonds.
Perhaps...I could not be content with mere contentment!
The harder the bargain men must strike with nature to survive, the more rules they're likely to have amongst themselves too keep them all in order
It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.
Ironing's nice and simple,' he said. 'I get all tangled up in words when I'm putting together those interminable papers....
She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the window of her eyes and this is very frightening.
