“I can be nothing worse and nothing better than who I am...Elly.”

“I did, of course, on both counts, and started going out with the boy I lost my virginity to - all of it. He lost his to me too, except that neither of us felt we had lost anything - just discovered the meaning of life and love and everything else unnecessary in between.”

“It was like looking into a dream. An imagination of what seduction in its purest form would look like. This woman was so intense, so deep and utterly sensual, the music flowed right out of her onto the cello and the process moved her so much, she couldn’t contain it. It was passion and it pulled him in.”

“A belief is not an idea held by the mind, it is an idea that holds the mind.”

“It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was. ”

“They are between. Not what they used to be, and not what they have become. In those times, they are nothing. And I am invisible, and I am nothing too. That is the true demimonde, Lucien, and the secret is, it is not always desperate and dark. Sometimes it is just nothing. No burden of potential or regret. There are worse things than being nothing, my friend.”

“Nothing better for the hormones and worse for the heart than the right boy at the right time.”