"Nevertheless there is no woman too humble, too battered, too old, to receive those outward attentions--those little gallantries and sorties of wit which I have come to associate with the Gallic temperament; the heady meretricious French charm which evaporates so easily into pride and mental indolence--like French thought which flows so quickly into sand-molds, the original espirit hardening immediately into deadening concepts." (38)
"The guileless playing of hermaphrodites in the green courtyards of art and science. Poetry as a clumsy attempt at the artificial insemination of the Muses" (39).
"Capodistria has the purely involuntary knack of turning everything into a woman; under his eyes chairs become painfully conscious of their bare legs. He impregnate things. At table I have seen a water-melon become conscious under his gaze so that it felt the seeds inside it stirring with life! Women feel like birds confronted by a viper when they gaze into that narrow flat face with its tongue always moving across the thin lips." (39)
"...the living limbo in which my beloved Jusine wandered, searching with such frightening singleness of mind for the integrating spark which might lift her into a new perspective of herself" (40).
"The sad thirteenth child of Valentinos who fell, 'not like Lucifer by rebelling against God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him.' Anything pressed too far becomes a sin." (40)
"Broken from the divine harmony of herself she fell, says the tragic philosopher and became the manifestation of matter; and the whole universe of her city, of the world, was formed out of her agony and remorse. The tragic seed from which her thoughts and actions grew was the seed of a pessimistic gnosticism." (40)
"Catching hold of the lapels of my coat she gazed earnestly into my eyes and said: 'What do you believe? You never say anything. At the most you sometimes laugh.' I did not know how to reply for all ideas seem equally good to me; the fact of their existence proves that someone is creating. Does it matter whether they are objectively right or wrong? They could never remain so for long." (41)
"As for Justine, her face was lit by a sort of painful academic precision." (44)
"How well I recognized her now as a child of the city, which decrees that its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain, doomed to hunt for what they least dare to find!" (47)
"I saw then what I should have seen long before: namely that our friendship had ripened to a point when we had already become in a way part-owners of each other." (48)
"'Idle,' she writes, 'to imagine falling in love as a correspondence of minds, of thoughts; it is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside of each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment of time, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors. All this may precede the first look, kiss, or touch; precede ambition, pride or envy; precede the first declarations which mark the turning point--for from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.' How characteristic and how humourless a delineation of the magical gift: and yet how true...of Justine!" (50)
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