Quotes from book

The Thief's Journal

“I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.”

“To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.”

“Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.”

“Betrayal is beautiful.”

“Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.”

“I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face.”

“But--criminals are remote from you--as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Thiers smells of sweat, sperm, and blood. In short, to my body and my thristy soul it offers devotion. It was because their world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil.”

“If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!”

“This violence is a calm that disturbs you.”

“Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which rejected me.”

“By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste.”

“With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable.”

“But I would adore that thief who is my mother.”

“Yet, what is their violence compared to mine, which was to accept theirs, to make it mine, to wish it for myself, to intercept it, to utilize it, to force it upon myself, to know it, to premeditate it, to discern and assume its perils? But what was mine, willed and necessary for my defense, my toughness, my rigor, compared to the violence they underwent like a malediction, risen from an inner fire simultaneously with an outer light which sets them ablaze and illuminates us?”