The guilt is always hurried towards its complement, the punishment, and only there he finds satisfaction.

The great prayer wound its way into my sleepy consciousness like a serpent, coil after shining coil of words-the voice of the muezzin sinking from register to register of gravity-until the whole...

An artist does not have a personal life as we do, he hides it, forcing us to go to his books if we wish to touch the true source of his feelings. Underneath all his preoccupations with sex, society,...

You can do three things with a woman; Either you love him or you suffer for him or you write it.

think she was also thinking, perhaps, of Justine, up there in the big house among the tall candles and the oil-paintings by forgotten masters.

Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.

Every variety of the name of flesh, old flesh quailing upon aged bones, or the unquenched flesh of boys and women on limbs infirm with the desires that could be represented in effigy but not be slaked...

These are not, you see, the sort of distinctions of which women are usually capable.

Its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least dare to find.

Some characters in the world are marked down for self-destruction, and to these no amount of rational argument can appeal.

The first thing he did when he was crazy was the trial against his own sons, two of us, having charged with conscious and malicious illegitimate.

Ancient lands, in all their prehistoric intactness: lake-solitudes hardly brushed by the hurrying feet of the centuries where the uninterrupted pedigrees of pelican and ibis and heron evolve their...

He sits all day on the terrace of the Brokers' Club watching women pass, with the restless eye of someone endlessly shuffling through an old soiled pack of cards.

The real teacher is endurance.

impressive symbols of a wealth which is powerless to bring true leisure or peace of mind for it demands everything of the human soul.

We had not a taste in common. Our characters and predispositions were wholly different, and yet in the magical ease of this friendship we felt something promised us.

Even "time is money" comes into the picture; and then, if you think that money is excrement for the Freudian, you understand that time must be also!

A novel should be an act of divination by entrails, not a careful record of a game of pat-ball on some vicarage lawn!