Evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant.
And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke’s palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can’t handle their cash just like the rich can’t, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way.
I am the lady of the castle. My name is exile. My name is anguish. My name is longing. Far from the world on the windy crests of the mountain, I am kept in absolute seclusion, my time passes in an endless reverie, a perpetual swooning. I am both the Sleeping Beauty and the enchanted castle; the princess drowses in the castle of her flesh.
There is a vast melancholy in the canticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the forest, endless as these long nights of winter and yet that ghastly sadness, that mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, can never move the heart for not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not come to the world from its own despair, only through some external mediator, so that, sometimes, the beast will look as if he half welcomes the knife that despatches him.
Have you ever stared stark failure in the face, young man? The trick is, to outstare it!
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.
The lilies i always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.
She was too young, too soft and new, to come to terms with these wild beings whose minds veered at crazy angles from the short, straight, smooth lines of her own experience.
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 can no longer tell the difference between memory and dream. They share the same quality of wishful thinking.
I am happy only in that I am a monster.
His skin covers me entirely; we are like two halves of a seed, enclosed in the same integument. I should like to grow enormously small, so that you could swallow me, like those queens in fairy tales who conceive when they swallow a grain of corn or a sesame seed. Then I could lodge inside your body and you would bear me.
Fish in the sea are luminous so that they can recognise one another; might not men and women also exude some kind of speechless luminescence to those akin to them?
She goes out at night more often now; the landscape assembles itself about her, she informs it with her presence. She is its significance.
The perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.
Snowlight, moonlight, a confusion of paw-prints.
The real value of a sexually attractive woman in a world which regards good looks as a commodity depends on the degree to which she puts her looks to work for her.
Swahili storytellers believe that women are incorrigibly wicked, diabolically cunning and sexually insatiable; I hope this is true, for the sake of the women.
The heart’s egoism sees itself suffering when it sees another suffering and so it learns sympathy, because it can put itself into another’s place; then the heart comes a little way out of its egoism and tentatively encounters the world. But, before the prospect of its own suffering, the heart melts completely and retreats into egoism, again, to protect itself.
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.