Petit Mal

As a Newbody, however, I began to like the pornographic circus of rough sex; the stuff that resembled some of the modern dance I had seen, animalistic, without talk. I begged to be turned into meat, held down, tied, blindfolded, slapped, pulled and strangled, entirely merged in the physical, all my swirling selves sucked into orgasm.

Hanif Kureishi | The Body

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Jean Baudrillard | Cool Memories

I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?

George Bataille | Ma mère

Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading a lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies. They could play, dance, love, and multiply their pleasures. They could leave a party, in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen, and contemplate the dreary line of employees going to work. They were the salt of the earth, and everything was given to them, everything was permitted for them, everything was possible.

Michele Houellebecq | The Possibility of an Island 

At night, forgotten words tried to reach me. I listened with my skin. Words tore my skin off, crept inside me, and nestled down. I was a mass of wounds. When I opened my mouth in front of the mirror, beasts lay asleep in my throat; they'd made it their home.

Margarita Karapanou | Kassandra and the Wolf

This is how it should be done. Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continua of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for a Body without Organs

Gilles Deleuze & Guattari | A Thousand Plateaus 

I shall possess this woman; I shall steal her from the husband who profanes her: I will even dare ravish her from the God whom she adores. What delight, to be in turns the object and the victor of her remorse! Far be it from me to destroy the prejudices which sway her mind! They will add to my happiness and my triumph. Let her believe in virtue, and sacrifice it to me; let the idea of falling terrify her, without preventing her fall; and may she, shaken by a thousand terrors, forget them, vanquish them only in my arms

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos | Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Love is a war of lightning, and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness. Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity, your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages, and a genital fire, transformed by delight, slips through the narrow channels of blood to precipitate a nocturnal carnation, to be, and be nothing but light in the dark. 

Pablo Neruda | Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon

At the moment everything was being destroyed she had created that which was most difficult: she had not drawn something out of nothing (a meaningless act), but given to nothing, in its form of nothing, the form of something.

What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others...And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?

Roberto Bolaño | 2666

Prohibition is masked as this kind of universal, objective, knowledge statement. The inherent dimension is that there are hidden prohibitions. Low fat or low cholesterol means you can easily enjoy it, but the form of a command is absent. You can do whatever you want, but… You have a society which is ostensibly oriented toward pure pleasure, but you pay for it through a whole series of "you can't." The hidden prohibitions: eat whatever you want, but beware of fat and cholesterol; smoke, but beware of nicotine; sex, but safe sex. Yet the ultimate consequence of this pleasure principle is that everything is prohibited in a way; you can't smoke: there's nicotine; you can't eat: there's fat; you can't have sex: you'll get sick. 

Slavoj Žižek | HIDDEN PROHIBITIONS AND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE

You must be life for me to the very end," so he writes. "That is the only way in which to sustain my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you see, tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to. I want you to live more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It's hard to talk of one's self so intimately

Henry Miller | Tropic of Cancer

…. Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack. Being attains a sense of self in relation to being as a function of this lack, in the experience of desire.

Jacques Lacan | Seminar II

1 The world is all that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts. 1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case. 1.13 The facts in logical space are the world. 1.2 The world divides into facts. 1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.

7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein | Tractatus Logico Philosophicus 

TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE... I have not meant to express my thought but to help you clarify what you yourself think... You are not any more different from me than your right leg is from your left, but what joins us is THE SLEEP OF REASON—WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS.

George Bataille | Theory of Religion 

Myron: Your goal is...

Myra: My goal is the destruction of the last vestigal traces of traditional manhood...

Myron: In order to...

Myra: Realign the sexes...

Myron: While...

Myra: Decreasing the population...

Myron: Thus...

Myra: Increasing human happiness...

Myron: And...

Myra: Preparing humanity for its next stage.

Myron: Bravo. Also... bullshit

Gore Vidal | Myra Breckinridge