There is a diabolical streak in me, a troublesome and inexplicable perversity.

Come now, don't make such a funeral face. It isn't dying that's sad; it's living when you're not happy.

Sheep run to the slaughterhouse, silent and hopeless, but at least sheep never vote for the butcher who kills them or the people who devour them. More beastly than any beast, more sheepish than any sheep, the voter names his own executioner and chooses his own devourer, and for this precious "right" a revolution was fought.

While I was an honorable man in her eyes, she did not love me. But the minute she understood what I was, when she breathed the true and foul odor of my soul, love was born in her – for she does love me! Well, well! There is nothing real, then, except evil.

When one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.

Desire can attain the darkest human terror and give an actual ideal of hell and its horror.

Why, flowers are violent, cruel, terrible and splendid... like love!