I have never been loved enough to gain the desire of reproducing a being in the image of my lover and I have never been given enough pleasure so that my brain has not had the leisure to seek better...I have wanted the impossible.

A very special case. A few years more, and that pretty creature who you love too much, I think, will, without ever loving them, have known as many men as there are beads on her aunt's rosary. No happy medium! Either a nun or a monster! God's bosom or sensual passions! It would, perhaps, be better to put her in a convent, since we put hysterical women in the Saltpetriere! She does not know vice, she invents it!" That was ten years ago before the day our story begins and... Raoule was not a nun.

If I created a new depravity I would be a priestess, while my imitators would founder, after my reign, in abominable filth...Don't you think that proud men, copying Satan, are more guilty than the Satan of the Bible, who invented pride? Is Satan not respectable because of his unprecedented and divinely inspired sin?

It is true, Monsieur," Raoule went on, shrugging her shoulders, "that I have had lovers in my life as I have books in my library, to know, to study. But I have had no passion, I have not written my own book yet! I always found myself alone when we were two. One is not weak when one remains master of one's self in the midst of the most stupefying pleasures.

I have never been loved enough to gain the desire of reproducing a being in the image of my lover and I have never been given enough pleasure so that my brain has not had the leisure to seek better...I have wanted the impossible.

The terrible poetry of human nudity, I understand it at last, I who tremble for the first time in trying to read it with blasé eyes.

All monsters have their fits of depression.