“They spent their time doing nothing... they let intimacy fuse them.”

“Even there, intimacy evolved its alchemy. A solemn marble stairway led to corridors covered with red carpets, upon which one moved noiselessly.”

“I was in the habit of calling a kiss a peck. Bulkaen had said “a smack.” As erotic language, such as we use in dalliance, is a kind of secretion, a concentrated juice that flows from the lips only in moments of the most intense emotion, of plaint, as this language is, in other words, the essential expression of passion, each pair of lovers has its own peculiar language, a language which has a perfume, an odor sui generis which belongs only to that couple… intimacy… the secret rites of a deep love.”

“Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing of ecstasy at all.”

“It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.”

“Anyone who has not experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.”

“Certain acts dazzle us and light up blurred surfaces, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them in a flash, for the beauty of a living thing can be grasped only fleetingly. To pursue it during its changes leads us inevitably to the moment when it ceases, for it cannot last a lifetime. And to analyze it, that is, to pursue it in time with the sight and the imagination, is to view it in its decline, for following the marvelous moment in which it reveals itself, it diminishes in intensity.”