Avarice is a closed door, you don't know what's happening behind it, & before knocking you feel anxious.

Avarice, he assured them, was the one passion that grew stronger and sweeter in old age.

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.

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.

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 gods are alone, and when they stroll, by chance, on earth, they are pathological cases or buffoons, or histrions...who are despised!