Romanticize your life. Make it into a movie that you’ve always dreamed of. Don’t let no one stop you from making your life enjoyable, not even yourself. Make it beautiful, make it worth living.

“I understand the meaning of nobility, beauty, and kindness.”

“Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent human being in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.”

“She lay in the darkness of her white satin bedroom, the mirrors throwing aureoles of false moonlight, the rows of perfume bottles creating false suspended gardens.”