First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You .... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up.

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.

on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.

There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.

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.

When I beheld you, suddenly - for perhaps a second - I had the strength to reject everything that wasn't you and to laugh at the illusion. But my shoulders are very frail. I was unable to bear the weight of the world's condemnation. And I began to hate you when everything about you would have kindled my love and when love would have made men's contempt unbearable, and their contempt would have made my love unbearable. The fact is, I hate you.