“He knew that in so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.”

“What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.”

“The right to own is the mark of a free man. The slave is a slave simply because he is denied that right. And because the free man is secure in the possession and enjoyment of what he produces, and the slave is not, the spur to production is in one and not in the other.”

“The void is a mouth crying to be filled, a blank mind aching for thought, a cavity desperate for shape. What is not implies what is.”

“Parmenides believed that all Being is what he called the One, and denied absolutely the possibility of change. He believed that the cosmos is full (i. e., no void), uncreated, eternal, indestructible, unchangeable, immobile sphere of being, and all sensory evidence to the contrary is illusory. One Parmenidean fragment stated, "Either a thing is or it is not," meaning that creation and destruction is impossible.”

“The big Other, the symbolic order, with a traumatic element at its very heart; and in Lacanian theory the fantasy is a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with this traumatic kernel. At this level the final moment of the analysis is defined as going through the fantasy [la traversée du fantasme]: not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, is merely filling out a lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing behind the fantasy; the fantasy is a construction whose function is to hide this void, this nothing”

“"One cannot lose what one has not possessed."
So much for that abrasive gem.
I can lose what I want. I want you.”

“Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying?”

“What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her.”

“Here is one quality that one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.”