The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty Quotes

“What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.”
― Anne Rice, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“It seems an insult to the night to speak of purpose and intent, when this common moment is so brimming full of blessed design tranquility. All things follow their course.”
― Anne Rice, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“This was the real world then- Beauty and I free to have each other and all the others gone. Just the two of us in my bedchamber, where I should envelop her naked soul in rituals and ordeals beyond our past experiences, our dreams. No one to save her from me. No one to save me from her. My slave, my poor helpless slave...”
― A.N Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“Why do I think these particular books have been popular? Two reasons. First, I think it is because they involve no harsh, garish violence at all. They involve game playing, really. No one is burned or cut or hurt. Certainly no one is killed. Indeed the whole sadomasochistic predicament is presented as a glorified game played out in luxurious rooms and with very attractive people, and involving very attractive slaves. There are endless motifs offered for dominance and submission, for surrender and love. It’s like a theme park of dominance and submission, a place to go to enjoy the fantasy of being overpowered by a beautiful man or woman and delightfully compelled to surrender and feel keening pleasure, without the slightest serious harm. I think it’s authentic to the way many who share this kind of fantasy really feel. I think what makes it work for people is the combination of the very graphic and unsparing sexual details mixed with the elegant fairy-tale world. Unfortunately a lot of hackwork pornography is written by those who don’t share the fantasy, and they slip into hideous violence and ugliness, thinking the market wants all that, when the market never really did. Second, this is shamelessly erotic. It pulls no punches at being what it is. It’s excessive and it is erotica. Before these books, a lot of women read what were called “women’s romances” where they had to mark the few “hot pages” in the book. I said, well, look, try this. Maybe this is what you really want, and you don’t have to mark the hot pages because every page is hot. Every page is about sexual fulfillment. Every page is meant to give you pleasure. There are no boring parts. Yet it’s very “romantic.” And well, I think this worked.”
― A.N. Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“A pen name enables you not only to cloak what you are doing from friends and family; it gives you a new freedom to do something you would not do as yourself.”
― A.N. Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“Well, surely you know. Didn’t you rebel? Don’t you? Why, Leon said of you there is a core in you which no one touches."

"Nonsense. I merely know and accept everything. There is no resistance."

"But how can it be?"

"Beauty, you must learn it. You must accept and yield, and then you shall see everything is simple."

"I would not be here with you if I yielded because of the Prince..."

"Yes, you could be here with me. I adore my Queen and I am here with you. I love you both. I yield to that entirely as well as everything else and even the knowledge I may be punished. And when I am punished, I shall dread it, and suffer it and understand it and accept it. Beauty, when you accept you will flower in the pain, you will flower in your suffering.”
― Anne Rice, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“That is your life now, and you are to think of nothing else, and regret nothing else. I want that dignity peeled away from you as if it were so many skins of the onion. I don’t mean that you should ever be graceless. I mean that you should surrender to me.”
― A.N. Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“She looked at the rounded buttocks of those made to kneel; she loved their polished chests, the muscularity of their limbs, and above all, perhas, the nobility of suffering in their handsome faces.”
― A.N. Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“I adore my Queen and I am here with you. I love you both. I yield to that entirely as well as everything else and even the knowledge I may be punished. And when I am punished, I shall dread it, and suffer it and understand it and accept it. when you accept you will flower in the pain, you will flower in your suffering”
― Anne Rice, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“For one moment, Beauty knew terror. But a delicious abandon took hold of her.”
― A.N. Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“You must curb your love as I curb mine. Believe me, I understand even as I condemn you.”
― A.N. Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“Adorned and yet exposed. It was mystifying.”
― A.N. Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“She saw the confusion and misery of the young Princes, their faces caught between struggle and surrender.”
― A.N. Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“And I’ve learned a very important lesson myself, that pain softens you, makes it easier for you. You are infinitely more malleable from the spanking given you in the Inn than you were before it.”
― A.N. Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“But no matter how hard she tried to excuse herself, she could not help but wondering if she could have tried harder.”
― A.N. Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“You need not be disobedient to merit it. I will punish when it pleases me. Sometimes that will be the only reason for it.”
― A.N. Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

“A calm descended upon her in which she heard her own heart and felt her body as if there were limitless time in which to know it.”
― A.N. Roquelaure, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty