23 quotes found
“Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.”
“If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring.”
“I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”
“Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself.”
“The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.”
“I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.”
“To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry h...”
“The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out.”
“Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in n...”
“Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.”
“Intimacy cannot be expressed discursively. The swelling to the bursting point, the malice that breaks out with clenched teeth and weeps; the sinking feeling that doesn't know where it comes from or...”
“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 th...”
“I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others th...”
“I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed,we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the whe...”
“These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evilan acute form of Evilwhich it expresses, has a...”
“My conduct with my friends is motivated: each being is, I believe, incapable on his own, of going to the end of being. If he tries, he is submerged within a "private being" which has meaning only f...”
“The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness thi...”
“Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commence from that point on.”
“Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.”
“Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those whic...”
