You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

Realism gives me the impression of a mistake. Violence alone escapes the feeling of poverty of those realistic experiences. Only death and desire have the force that oppresses, that takes one's breath away. Only the extremism of desire and death enable one to attain the truth.

We have in fact only two certainties in this world - that we are not everything and that we will die.

It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all menthat alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms.

The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.

We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.

It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men. But extreme seductiveness is probably at the boundary of horror.