Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.

The force of what was called Panther rhetoric or word mongering resided not in elegant discourse but in strength of affirmation (or denial), in anger of tone and timbre. When the anger led to action there was no turgidity or over-emphasis. Anyone who has witnessed political rows among the Whites will have to admit that the Whites aren't overburdened with poetic imagination.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.

In order to weep, I had descended to the realm of the dead themselves, to their secret chambers, led by the invisible but soft hands of birds down stairways which were folded up again as I advanced. I displayed my grief in the friendly fields of death, far from men: within myself.

One can hear all that's going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what's going on in this house.

Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.

They spent their time doing nothing... they let intimacy fuse them.