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To this day, no one knows who Pauline Réage is.
Finally, let it be said that to surrender oneself to the will of others (as often happens with lovers and mystics) and so find oneself at last rid of selfish pleasures, interests, and personal complexes, is in no wise a joyless act, nor one lacking in grandeur.
Story of O is one of those books which marks the reader, which leaves him not quite, or not at all, the same as he was before he read it.
You have to get past the pleasure stage, until you reach the stage of tears.”
She did not wish to die, but if torture was the price she had to pay to keep her lover’s love, then she only hoped he was pleased that she had endured it. All soft and silent she waited, waited for them to bring her back to him.
The more he surrendered her, the more he would hold her dear. The fact that he gave her was to him a proof, and ought to be one for her as well, that she belonged to him: one can only give what belongs to you.
The chains and the silence, which should have bound her deep within herself, which should have smothered her, strangled her, on the contrary freed her from herself.
And yet never had she felt herself more totally committed to a will which was not her own, more totally a slave, and more content to be so.
She considered herself fortunate to count enough in his eyes for him to derive pleasure from offending her, as believers give thanks to God for humbling them.
O was happy that René had had her whipped and had prostituted her, because her impassioned submission would furnish her lover with the proof that she belonged to him, but also because the pain and shame of the lash, and the outrage inflicted upon her by those who compelled her to pleasure when they took her, and at the same time delighted in their own without paying the slightest heed to hers, seemed to her the very redemption of her sins.
He whom one awaits is, because he is expected, already present, already master.
a worrisome, uncertain love, one he was far from sure was requited, a love that acts not, for fear of offending.
Would she ever dare tell him that no pleasure, no joy, no figment of her imagination could ever compete with the happiness she felt at the way he used her with such utter freedom, at the notion that he could do anything with her, that there was no limit, no restriction in the manner with which, on her body, he might search for pleasure?
