Book Quotes

Arrange for me a clear space where I can put my favorite crudity, love. Merely to have it before me and to breath it in, merely to touch it with hand or tooth, it keeps me young. What they has changed between us, between love and me? Nothing, unless myself, or love. Everything that proceeds from love still wears its color and spreads over me.

The thing we all have in common is a certain diffidence: we never dare to show openly that we need each other. Such reserve acts as a code of behavior I call our “etiquette of survivors”

They have so perfected their art of dissimulation that by comparison, everything else seems imperfect.

They and I were confronted with identical dangers: and intractable man and a pernicious woman; we knew what it was to tremble with fright. But I always knew why my heart sank and why I trembled. I envied them.

“Can you not allow us to wander among the planets or simply think of nothing?”

“In short, what did they want? Almost nothing. Everything.”

“We can never sufficiently blame the Sapphos met by chance, we can never bring enough twilight, silence, and gravity to surround the embrace of two women. These are the delights of constant companionship, how marvelously compact, the repitition of days, repeated line the reflections of a lamp in a perspective of mirrors.

Is there anything as perilously fragile as an amourous ménage of two women? The attempt at a union of two such creatures, almost invariably well meaning at first, but when could they lay home of a sense of the future? Those two enamored women, at every moment, demolish it and deny it, who envisage neither beginning nor end nor change nor solitude, who breathe the air only á deux. Two women immersed in each other do not fear, and can no longer imagine a separation, that would be intolerable”

“That’s the way it is. A woman isn’t faithful to a woman who isn’t there”

“I am alluding to a genuine mental hermaphroditism which burdens certain highly complex human beings…the masculine streak in my character by some trait of mine I could not identify.”

“That feeling of security increases as I listen to a man talking, for mine is the very human pleasure of witnessing catastrophes.”

“I’m devoted with all my heart. But what is the heart, madame? It’s worth less than people think. It’s quite accommodating, it accepts anything. But the body…that’s something else entirely! It has a cultivated taste, as they say, it knows what it wants. A heart doesn’t choose, and one always ends up by loving, I’m the living proof.”

I feel I am in love with you and it should be spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and bird-calls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.

“People say ‘phase’ like impermanence means insignificance. Show me a permanent state of the self.”

"What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one me.”

“Don’t rest in peace, live in peace.”