Justine Quotes

“I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“The two horsewomen of the apocalypse still win, despite their dwindling numbers.”
― Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son

“You can overcome whatever is going on around you if you believe in the light that lives within you.”
― Justine Edward, Shine

“The world is like a cucumber—today it's in your hand, tomorrow up your arse.”
― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

“Stop. Revive. Survive”
― Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son

“Having proven that solitary pleasures are as delicious as any others and much more likely to delight, it becomes perfectly clear that this enjoyment, taken in independence of the objectwe employ, is not merely of a nature very remote from what could be pleasurable to thatobject, but is even found to be inimical to that object’s pleasure: what is more, it may becomean imposed suffering, a vexation, or a torture, and the only thing that results from this abuse isa very certain increase of pleasure for the despot who does the tormenting or vexing; let usattempt to demonstrate this.”Voluptuous emotion is nothing but a kind of vibration produced in our soul by shockswhich the imagination, inflamed by the remembrance of a lubricious object, registers uponour senses, either through this object’s presence, or better still by this object’s being exposedto that particular kind of irritation which most profoundly stirs us; thus, our voluptuoustransport Ä this indescribable convulsive needling which drives us wild, which lifts us to thehighest pitch of happiness at which man is able to arrive Ä is never ignited save by twocauses: either by the perception in the object we use of a real or imaginary beauty, the beautyin which we delight the most, or by the sight of that object undergoing the strongest possiblesensation; now, there is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certainand dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign andalmost never experience; and, furthermore, how much self-confidence, youth, vigor, healthare not needed in order to be sure of producing this dubious and hardly very satisfyingimpression of pleasure in a woman. To produce the painful impression, on the contrary,requires no virtues at all: the more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable,the more resounding his success. With what regards the objective, it will be far more certainlyattained since we are establishing the fact that one never better touches, I wish to say, that onenever better irritates one’s senses than when the greatest possible impression has been produced in the employed object, by no matter what devices; therefore, he who will cause themost tumultuous impression to be born in a woman, he who will most thoroughly convulsethis woman’s entire frame, very decidedly will have managed to procure himself the heaviest possible dose of voluptuousness, because the shock resultant upon us by the impressionsothers experience, which shock in turn is necessitated by the impression we have of thoseothers, will necessarily be more vigorous if the impression these others receive be painful,than if the impression they receive be sweet and mild; and it follows that the voluptuousegoist, who is persuaded his pleasures will be keen only insofar as they are entire, willtherefore impose, when he has it in his power to do so, the strongest possible dose of painupon the employed object, fully certain that what by way of voluptuous pleasure he extractswill be his only by dint of the very lively impression he has produced.”
― Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade

“You think you're charging up that memory? Is that what you think? You are going to be so sorry when I dream about my experience of eating chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream yesterday. Now that was exciting.”
― Carolyn Crane, Double Cross

“How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.”
― Lawrence Durrell

“after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.”
― Lawrence Durrell

“Love, she reflected bitterly, wasn't something you bargained with or negotiated with...it lived by its own rules. Love appeared when you didn't want it and refused to go. It was like an invasive species that entered your garden without warning, and proceeded to grow wildly out of control, resistant to every method employed to kill it.
Basically, love was pigweed.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Crystal Cove

“Repression is Justine's whole being - repression of sex, of anger and of her own violence; the repressions demanded of Christian virtue, in fact.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“How I love to hear the rich and titled, the magistrates and the priests, how I love to watch them preach virtue to us! It is very hard to keep oneself from stealing when one has three times more than one to live! A great strain to never think of murder when one is surrounded by sycophants and slaves for whom your will is law! Truly difficult to be temperate and sober when one is at all times surrounded by the most succulent dishes! So difficult for them to be sincere when they have no reason to lie!”
― Marquis de Sade, Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue

“This is what men have done to me. This is what I have learnt from the dangers of associating with them. Is it surprising that, embittered by misfortune and revolted by outrages and injustices, I should in my heart aspire only to avoid all contact with them in the future?”
― Marquis de Sade, Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue

“Düşünürün görevi düşünceler ileri sürmektir, oysa azizin işi susmak, bulduğu şeyi söylememektir.”
― Lawrence Durrell

“Pensaba y sufría mucho, pero le faltaba la fuerza necesaria para atreverse, primer requisito del que hace algo.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“Justine is a good woman in a man's world. She is a good woman according to the rules for women laid down by men and her reward is rape, humiliation and incessant beatings. Her life is that of a woman martyrised by the circumstances of her life as a woman.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“I soon shall see you again in heaven, where we shall all be happy; and that consoles me, going as I am to suffer ignominy and death.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Original 1818 Gothic Historical Literary Fiction

“For Justine's conception of virtue is a specifically feminine one in that sexual abstinence plays a large part in it. In common speech, a 'bad boy' may be a thief, or a drunkard, or a liar, and not necessarily just a womaniser. But a 'bad girl' always contains the meaning of a sexually active girl and Justine knows she is good because she does not fuck.”
― Angela Carter

“Tell me honestly’ he says. ‘Do I look my age?’
Frankly Scobie looks anybody’s age; older than the birth of tragedy, younger than the Athenian death. Spawned in the Ark by a chance meeting and mating of the bear and the ostrich; delivered before term by the sickening grunt of the keel on Ararat. Scobie came forth from the womb in a wheel chair with rubber tyres, dressed in a deer-stalker and a red flannel binder. On his prehensile toes the glossiest pair of elastic-sided boots. In his hand a ravaged family Bible whose fly-leaf bore the words ‘Joshua Samuel Scobie 1870. Honour thy father and thy mother’. To these possessions were added eyes like dead moons, a distinct curvature of the pirate’s spinal column, and a taste for quinqueremes. It was not blood which flowed in Scobie’s veins but green salt water, deep-sea stuff. His walk is the slow rolling grinding trudge of a saint walking on Galilee. His talk is a green-water jargon swept up in five oceans — an antique shop of polite fable bristling with sextants, astrolabes, porpentines and isobars. When he sings, which he so often does, it is in the very accents of the Old Man of the Sea. Like a patron saint he has left little pieces of his flesh all over the world, in Zanzibar, Colombo, Togoland, Wu Fu: the little deciduous morsels which he has been shedding for so long now, old antlers, cuff-links, teeth, hair…. Now the retreating tide has left him high and dry above the speeding currents of time, Joshua the insolvent weather-man, the islander, the anchorite.”
― LAWRENCE DURELL, The Alexandria Quartet