...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

I seemed like a baby bird keeping its truly innocent animal lusts hidden under its wing. I was being tempted, not by the desire of possession, but simply by unadorned temptation itself.

...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

His emotion evident in the glitter of his eyes.

Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.

Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.