“It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined- a dummy creation that little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble.”

“This is the truth: we all desire to conquer the comely one, because it affirms our own worth. Speaking for the men of the world, we want to own the beauty of the woman we're fucking. We want to grasp that beauty, tightly in our greedy little fingers, to well and truly possess it, to make it ours. We want to do this as the woman shines her way through an orgasm. That's perfection. And while I can't speak for women, I imagine that they-whether they admit it or not-want the same thing: to possess the man, to own his rough handsomeness, if only for a few seconds.”

“And it is a fact an absolute fact that there are creatures on the surface of this earth that have never been studied by man . . . There are other worls - worlds within this world - that we can only begin to imagine. We may think we have seen all that there is to be seen on this tiny planet of ours. We most certainly have not - and perhaps never shall.”

“The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.”

“Know, therefore, that from the greater silence I shall return..... Forget not that I shall come back to you....A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and anohter woman shall bear me.”

“Children, brought up naturally and in freedom, not only have imagination, but live in a world of imagination more real to them than our reality. ("Absolute Evil")”