My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man Quotes

“You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“And, writing to you, I know that I cannot speak to you, but there is no way of preventing myself from speaking. I am going abroad, as far away as possible, but everywhere I go I shall be in the same delirium, the same whether far from you or near, for the pleasure in me depends on no one, it emanates from me alone, from the imbalance in me which perpetually frays my nerves. You can see it for yourself, you aren’t the cause of it, I can do without you and I want you at a distance from me, but if you are involved, if it be a question of you, then I want to be in this delirium, I want you to behold it, I want it to destroy you.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“Observing her, I saw that she was made up, that she was in an evening gown, that mourning indecently emphasized her beauty.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“...being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of experiencing of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. (Mishima on Bataille)”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“...out of despair I decided to follow this horror through. I stared down at what I was already grasping in my hand, like an ape; I wrapped myself in the dust and took off my trousers.
Interwoven joy and terror strangled me within. I strangled and I gasped from pleasure. The more those pictures terrified me, the more intense was my excitement at the sight of them. After days of accumulating alarms, tensions, suffocations, I was beyond withstanding my own ignominy. I invoked it and I blessed it. It was my inevitable fate: my joy was all the greater since, with regard to life, I had long since entrenched myself in an attitude of suffering, and now, in the throes of delight, I progressed even farther into vileness and degradation.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“If ultimately there was a tantalizing rectitude about her, she was none the less cunning: her exceeding gentleness, howbeit mitigated sometimes by the disturbing oppressiveness that foretells a storm in the air, left me utterly blind.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“What I want, is that you love me even unto death. For my part, it is in death I love you at this very instant. But I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“I don’t want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“Terror unendingly renews with advancing age. Without end, it returns us to the beginning. The beginning that I glimpse on the edge of the grave is the pig in me which neither death nor insult can kill. Terror on the edge of the grave is divine and I sink into terror whose child I am.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“The difficulties, the problems of the flesh, its treacheries, its failings, its terrors, the misunderstandings it engenders, the maladroitness it is the occasion of, these alone provide a basis and excuse for chastity.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“In the solitude I entered, the norms of this world, if they do subsist, do so in order to maintain a dizzying feeling of enormity: this solitude, it is God.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“What I want', were the words she left me with, administering a poison, 'is that you love me even unto death. For my part, it is in death I love you at this very instant. But I don't want your love unless you know I am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man