what I was going to learn from Madame Moreau would be learnt a few months later and in the company of Alba Cambó and Valentino Coraggioso. And that knowledge would have little to do with vocabulary lists and conjugations, but more with something of wider human relevance that might be summed up as the fact that beneath the thick skin of even the most armour-plated person there is always a crack that runs straight to the centre and you should think it over very carefully before raising a hand to signal your willingness to fall inside.
– Bret Easton Ellis and Other Dogs, pp. 110-111, Lina Wolff, Trans. Frank Perry, Los Angeles, CA: & Other Stories
The way little people, bewildered people, try and explain art and life using a couple of proverbs designed for the illiterate. I shouldn’t have let him anywhere near that book, I thought. If you want to keep something safe, keep it to yourself, you should never let vulgar and simple-minded people anywhere near it. They turn everything into mincemeat; they can transform a diamond into filthy snow just by looking at it.
– Ibid., pp. 277-278
her eyes were someone else’s eyes, her mouth belonged to a different person, and even her hair was different. As though a building I had been living in for most of my life and whose every nook and cranny I thought I knew and believed I had seen, explored, and even felt shut in by from time to time, suddenly unveiled a set of alternate room, as though a secret door had been opened and was showing me a wing decorated completely differently from the rest of the house, using paints and materials that appeared to have been borrowed from a decadent film. That was where she was now.
– Ibid, pp. 286-287
her body was still cooling under a sheet that had stretched over her by two nurses and folded just below her chin. … A patch of sunlight wandering through the room or a breeze entering suddenly through an open window, or a murmur coming from the street, would have provided that sense of the infinite, of something coming to a complete stop at moments like these.
-Ibid., p. 292
