The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

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 heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on the condition that they may be insipid.

Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry.

What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? – A violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?

I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?

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

The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.