I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.

You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just as long as, the movie lasted, and then all would all vanish.

Vengeful as nature herself, she loves her children only in order to devour them better and if she herself rips her own veils of self-deceit, Mother perceives in herself untold abysses of cruelty as subtle as it is refined.

She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.

The only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an ... urgent deadline in the offing.

I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.