“The only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating.”

“The tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax.Is the tickling scene, at its most reassuring, not a unique representation of desire and, at its most unsettling, a paradigm of the perverse contract?Does it not highlight, this delightful game, the impossibility of satisfaction and of reunion, with its continual reenactment of the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration?”

“What most moved me in his letter was the sense of frustration that permeated the lieutenent's words: the frustration of never quite being able to depict or explain anything to his full satisfaction.”

“Some kinds of hunger were sweet in themselves, the anticipation of satisfaction as keen a pleasure as the slaking.”

“There is no satisfaction in eternity,' she said. 'There is only loss.”

“It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work in not only convenient but unavoidable.”