Some of my fav quotes from Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

p1 I have no heart, I’ll never love with my heart, perhaps never even with my senses. But my imagination is a wildly seething thing that swims in raging waters, always bubbling, hissing, wild, and restless, and he spoke to my imagination, whirled it around still more wildly, fanned its flames into a sea of fire with his burning breath. -Emilie Mataja about Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

p4: Everything seethed and clashed within me, & I grew by turns melancholy and then exuberant for no reason.

p5. Genuine talent tends to frighten the common people, among whom I would include most writers and critics.

p66. I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile. I literally adore her.

P65. In love too, I am a dilettante who never got beyond the preparation, the first act.

P67. From Goethe’s Faust: To Amor The pair of wings a fiction are/The arrows, they are naught but claws/The wreath conceals the little horns, For without any doubt he is/Like all the gods of ancient Greece/Only a devil in disguise

p70: one is either very polite to oneself or very rude.

P73 ‘You look at love, and especially women,’ she began, ‘as something hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. ..’

75 I will live my own life as it pleases me. I am willing to do without your hypocritical respect; I prefer to be happy. … I, however, have no wish to live eternally. When with my last breath everything as far as Wanda von Dunajew is concerned comes to an end here below, what does it profit me whether my dust goes into the formation of new beings?

P 103 I am yours for good or evil, choose. The destiny that lies concealed within my breast drives me on—demoniacally—relentlessly.

P 110: It is strange how every relation in life assumes a different face as soon as a new person enters.

P 192: I let my entire life pass before me. On the whole, it is rather a wretched affair—a few joys, an endless number of indifferent and worthless things, and between these an abundant harvest of pain, misery, fear, disappointment, shipwrecked hopes, afflictions, sorrow and grief.