"I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote life, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for Him only the first evidence of an inherent singularity?"
"You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable sighs-the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and sham the tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate- the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; he stands unrecognized by them and unconscious himself of his fantastic power."
"The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer or genius or the most talented impotent might imagine. My world was split."
"A cold I caught from him led me to cancel a fourth assignment, nor as I sorry to break an emotional series that threatened to burden me with heart-rending fantasies and peter out in dull disappointment."
"It occurred to me that regular hours, home cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the prophylactic routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain moral values, of certain spiritual substitutes, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous desires, at least to keep them under pacific control."
"He was, obviously, one of those men whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never his soul; men who are completely devoid of humor; men utterly indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible subjects of a parlor conversation, but very particular about the rules of such conversations, through the sunny cellophane of which not very appetizing frustrations can be readily distinguished."
