Monsters, monsters! But there are no monsters! What you call monsters are superior forms, or forms beyond your understanding.

For to arrive somewhere means to die!

Have you ever been at a festival when you were sad or ill? Well, then you’ve felt how much your sadness was irritated and exasperated, as by an insult, by the joyful faces and the beauty of things. It’s an intolerable feeling. Think of what it must mean to a victim who is going to die under torture. Think how much the torture is multiplied in his flesh and his soul by all the splendour which surrounds him; and how much more atrocious is his agony, how much more hopelessly atrocious, darling!

You see how all occidental art loses by the fact that the magnificent expressions of love have been denied it. With us, eroticism is poor, stupid and frigid. It is always presented in ambiguous attitudes of sin, while here it preserves all its vital scope, all its passionate poetry and the stupendous pulse of all nature. But you are only a european lover... a poor, timid, chilly little soul.

In that atrocious second I understood that desire can attain the darkest human terror and give an actual idea of hell and its horror.

Look here, before you and around you! There is not a grain of sand that has not been bathed in blood, and what is that grain of sand itself, if not the dust of death? But how rich this blood is, and how fertile is the dust!

Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he will always see that word: murder – immortally inscribed upon the pediment of that vast slaughterhouse – humanity.

Nothing comes at all – never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.

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

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