Histoire d'O | Story of O Quotes

“As a matter of fact," the other voice went on, "if you do tie her up from time to time, or whip her just a little, and she begins to like it, that’s no good either. You have to get past the pleasure stage, until you reach the stage of tears.”
― Pauline Réage, Histoire d'O | Story of O

“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?”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“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.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“Whatever he wanted of her she wanted too, solely because he was asking it of her.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“Finally a woman confesses! Confess what? What women never allowed themselves to confess. What men always criticized on them: they only obey the blood and everything is sex on them, even the spirit.”
― Pauline Réage, Histoire d'O | Story of O

“She was waiting for more than permission, since she already had permission. She was waiting for an order.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“Her freedom was worse than any chains.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“She was no longer free? Yes! thank God, she was no longer free. But she was light, a nymph on clouds, a fish in water, lost in happiness.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“She wanted him to love her, there, the truth was out: she wanted him to be chafing under the urge to touch her lips and penetrate her body, to devastate her if need be, but not to remain so calm and self-possessed.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“Your jealousy does not deceive you. It is true that you make me healthy and happy and a thousand times more alive. Yet there is nothing I can do to prevent this happiness from turning against you. The stone also sings more loudly when the blood flows free and the body is at rest. Keep me rather in this cage, and feed me sparingly, if you dare. Anything that brings me closer to illness and the edge of death makes me more faithful. It is only when you make me suffer that I feel safe and secure. You should never have agreed to be a god for me if you were afraid to assume the duties of a god, and we all know that they are not as tender as all that.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“Keep me rather in this cage, and feed me sparingly, if you dare. Anything that brings me closer to illness and the edge of death makes me more faithful. It is only when you make me suffer that I feel safe and secure. You should never have agreed to be a god for me if you were afraid to assume the duties of a god, and we all know that they are not as tender as all that. You have already seen me cry. Now you must learn to relish my tears.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“To say that O began to await her lover the minute he left her is a vast understatement: she was henceforth nothing but vigil and night.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“They can do whatever they want with me, I don’t care,” she murmured. “But tell me you still love me.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“She was apt at hunting, a naturally trained bird of prey who would beat the game and always bring it back to the hunter. And speaking of the devil … It”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“He whom one awaits is, because he is expected, already present, already master.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“She felt as though she were a statue of ashes—bitter, useless, damned—like the salt statues of Gomorrah. For she was guilty. Those who love God, and by Him are abandoned in the dark of night, are guilty, because they are abandoned.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“The word “open” and the expression “opening her legs” were, on her lover’s lips, charged with such uneasiness and power that she could never hear them without experiencing a kind of internal prostration, a sacred submission, as though a god, and not he, had spoken to her.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“She could not help thinking that the expression “open oneself to someone,” which meant to give oneself, for her had only one meaning, a literal, physical, and in fact absolute meaning, for she was in fact opening every part of her body which was capable of being opened. It also seemed to her that this was her raison d’être”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“But he spoke. Holding her by the collar, with two fingers slipped in between the neck and collar, he told her it was his intention that henceforth she should be shared by him and those of his choosing, and by those whom he did not know who were connected to the society of the château, shared as she had been the previous evening.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“And, what is more, we know how an all-consuming passion for freedom in the world never fails to lead to conflicts and wars which are no less consuming. ”
― Jean Paulhan, Histoire d'O | Story of O

“She moaned in the darkness, all the time he possessed her. The”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“The right to dispose of her body however they wished, in whatever place or manner they should choose, the right to keep her in chains, the right to whip her like a slave or prisoner for the slightest failing or infraction, or simply for their pleasure, the right to pay no heed to her pleas and cries, if they should make her cry out.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“What her lover wanted from her was very simple: that she be constantly and immediately accessible. It was not enough for him to know that she was: she was to be so without the slightest obstacle intervening, and her bearing and clothing both were to bespeak, as it were, the symbol of that availability to experienced eyes.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“Also the spectacle and the awareness of her own body. Daily and, so to speak, ceremoniously soiled with saliva and sperm, she felt herself literally to be the respository of impurity, the sink mentioned in the Scriptures. And yet those parts of her body most constantly offended, having become less sensitive, at the same time seemed to her to have become more beautiful and, as it were, ennobled: her mouth closed upon anonymous members, the tips of her breasts constantly fondled by hands, and between her quartered thighs the twin, contiguous paths wantonly ploughed.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“For a long time he had wanted to prostitute her, and he was delighted to feel that the pleasure he was deriving was even greater than he had hoped, and that it bound him to her all the more, as it bound her to him, all the more so because, through it, she would be more humiliated and ravaged. Since she loved him, she could not help loving whatever derived from him.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“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.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“In a loud voice, he told her that he loved her. O, trembling, was terrified to notice that she answered “I love you,” and that it was true.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“But what a delight and comfort, this iron ring which pierces the flesh and weighs one down forever, this mark eternal, how peaceful and reassuring the hand of a master who lays you on a bed of rock, the love of a master who knows how to take what he loves ruthlessly, without pity.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“That the female of the species was as cruel as, and more implacable than, the male, O had never doubted for a minute.”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O

“And it was true that she had to accept, to consent in the real sense of the term, for nothing would be inflicted upon her by force to which she had not already previously consented; she could refuse, nothing was keeping her enslaved except her love and her self-enslavement. What prevented her from leaving?)”
― Pauline Réage, Story of O