“An error of the passions is not the flowering of a great love, and merely the beauty of the human form is not capable of inspiring an eternity of mad attachment.”

“Ah! A man who doesn't know how to watch love is so silly. You really need a lesson.”

“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?”

“All monsters have their fits of depression.”

“No, no, don't let my vulnerable heart share in this sacrifice to lust! Let him disgust me before pleasing me! Let him be what others have been, an instrument that I can break before becoming the echoes of its vibration.”

“An error of the passions is not the flowering of a great love, and merely the beauty of the human form is not capable of inspiring an eternity of mad attachment.”

“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.”

“It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain a mere dependent (and thus conservative) form of social discourse. Reversal plays a double role in this novel (MONSIEUR VENUS), for it is not only a formal strategy bearing on citation, but itself a citation as well; one more cliché mobilized from the fin-de-siecle reserve.”