All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.
The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride, or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point—for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.
A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.
What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?
Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.
'We live' writes Pursewarden somewhere 'lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time — not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation oа reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.
Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
Comedians are the nearest to suicide.
The memory of man is as old as misfortune
Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it.
A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.
We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point.
The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.
Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.
A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.
I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.
The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.
People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it.
There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self -- because she does not know where to find it.
To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.
She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.
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