"If literature stays away from evil, it rapidly becomes boring."
- Georges Bataille
"My conduct with my friends is motivated: each being is, I believe, incapable on his own, of going to the end of being. If he tries, he is submerged within a "private being" which has meaning only for ..."
"Man always becomes other. Man is the animal who continually differs from himself."
"Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude."
"The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things..."
"The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death."
"Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commence from that point on."
"I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it."
"...being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of experiencing of re-experiencing any..."