Horror immobolizes us because it is made of contradictory feelings: fear and seduction, repulsion and attraction. Horror is a fascination...Horror is immobility, the great yawn of empty space, the womb and the hole in the earth, the universal Mother and the great garbage heap...With horror we cannot have recourse to flight or combat, there remains only Adoration or Exorcism.
He was the kind of young man whose handsome face has brought him plenty of success in the past and is now ever-ready for a new encounter, a fresh-experience, always eager to set off into the unknown territory of a little adventure, never taken by surprise because he has worked out everything in advance and is waiting to see what happens, a man who will never overlook any erotic opportunity, whose first glance probes every woman's sensuality, and explores it, without discriminating between his friend's wife and the parlour-maid who opens the door to him. Such men are described with a certain facile contempt as lady-killers, but the term has a nugget of truthful observation in it, for in fact all the passionate instincts of the chase are present in their ceaseless vigilance: the stalking of the prey, the excitement and mental cruelty of the kill. They are constantly on the alert, always ready and willing to follow the trail of an adventure to the very edge of the abyss. They are full of passion all the time, but it is the passion of a gambler rather than a lover, cold, calculating and dangerous. Some are so persistent that their whole lives, long after their youth is spent, are made an eternal adventure by this expectation. Each of their days is resolved into hundreds of small sensual experiences - a look exchanged in passing, a fleeting smile, knees brushing together as a couple sit opposite each other - and the year, in its own turn, dissolves into hundreds of such days in which sensuous experience is the constantly flowing, nourishing, inspiring source of life.
Quote Detail
He was the kind of young man whose handsome face has brought him plenty of success in the past and is now ever-ready for a new encounter, a fresh-experience, always eager to set off into the unknown territory of a little adventure, never taken by surprise because he has worked out everything in advance and is waiting to see what happens, a man who will never overlook any erotic opportunity, whose first glance probes every woman's sensuality, and explores it, without discriminating between his friend's wife and the parlour-maid who opens the door to him. Such men are described with a certain facile contempt as lady-killers, but the term has a nugget of truthful observation in it, for in fact all the passionate instincts of the chase are present in their ceaseless vigilance: the stalking of the prey, the excitement and mental cruelty of the kill. They are constantly on the alert, always ready and willing to follow the trail of an adventure to the very edge of the abyss. They are full of passion all the time, but it is the passion of a gambler rather than a lover, cold, calculating and dangerous. Some are so persistent that their whole lives, long after their youth is spent, are made an eternal adventure by this expectation. Each of their days is resolved into hundreds of small sensual experiences - a look exchanged in passing, a fleeting smile, knees brushing together as a couple sit opposite each other - and the year, in its own turn, dissolves into hundreds of such days in which sensuous experience is the constantly flowing, nourishing, inspiring source of life.
Quick Answer
What this quote page tells you
This canonical quote page keeps the full saying, the attributed author, any linked work, and the topic tags together so the quote can be cited from one stable URL.
Related Quotes
More quote cards from the same area
She hadn__ come for any of that. She came for him. Twenty feet in front of her, leaning back against the waist-high bar, stood the man she__ spent all day tracking down__he infamous Dillon James. The man who would soon have the power to take away everything she held dear.
He held his hand out, palm up, watching her with soft, penetrating eyes, deep, dark eyes that called to her the longer she stared at them. __ow __out you give me the benefit of the doubt every once in a while, hmm? I__ like a chance to prove I__ not that stupid kid anymore.
Doubt filled her eyes. __hat are we betting for, anyway?__e hadn__ thought about that, but it took his brain all of three seconds to come up with an answer. He knew damn well what he wanted from her. Had for years.__ kiss._ The words slipped from his lips before he could stop them, but once out, he didn__ want to take them back. __ne kiss after you come back and see she__ all right.
I__ broken. Fucked up. I feel sick. I can__ breathe. It__ like someone__ snaked their fingers around my heart, capturing it in a crushing grip. It__ Emma. This is her doing. Well, it won__ fucking bleed for her. It won__ bleed for anyone. It__ black. I__ dead inside.
I completely lost control. I was out of my fucking mind with the taste of her, the feel of her, those little moans of pleasure she made. Fuck, that woman completely unmans me. She consumes me to the point where my brain stops functioning entirely_.