Nine and a Half Weeks Quotes

“This one, I guess," he says. I look over at the counter, he is looking back at me. He is holding a riding crop: "I'd like to try it out." There is a peculiar shift: from one second to the next I have become disoriented, I am on alien territory, in a foreign century. He walks a few steps to where I am half sitting on the desk, one foot on the floor, the other dangling. He pulls my skirt up my left leg, which is resting on the desk, steps back and strikes me across the inner thigh.
The searing pain is an inextricable part of a wave of excitement; every cell in my body is awash with lust.
It is silent in the small, dusty room. The clerks behind the counter have frozen.
He slowly smooths down my skirt and turns to the older man, who is wearing a suit and still looks like an accountant, though a deep flush is spreading upward from his shirt collar.
"This one will do.”
― Elizabeth McNeill, Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair

“So it went, a step at a time. And since we saw each other every night; since each increment of change was unspectacular in itself; since he made love very, very well; since I was soon crazy about him, not just physically, but especially so, it came about that I found myself – after the time span of a mere two weeks – in a setup that would be judged, by the people I know, as pathological.

It never occurred to me to call it pathological. I never called “it” anything. I told no one about it. That it was me who lived through this period seems, in retrospect, unthinkable. I dare only look back on those weeks as on an isolated phenomenon, now in the past; a segment of my life as unreal as a dream, lacking all implication.”
― Elizabeth McNeill, Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair

“When my skin had gone back to its even tone I slept with another man and discovered, my hands lying awkwardly on the sheet at either side of me, that I had forgotten what to do with them. I'm responsible and an adult again, full time. What remains is that my sensation thermostat has been thrown out of whack; it's been years and sometimes I wonder whether my body will ever again register above lukewarm.”
― Elizabeth McNeill, Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair

“By the time the utter predictability of my orgasm sank into my brain, it had, of course, long been familiar to my body. There was no mistaking the power this man had over me. Like a well-made windup toy, whenever he set me in motion I came. Moods of wanting or not wanting to make love were moods I remembered as from a book. It was not a matter of insatiability but one of inevitability of response. He did what he did and then I always, inevitably, finally came. Only the preludes varied.”
― Elizabeth McNeill, Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair

“Cuando mi piel recuperó un tono uniforme, dormí con otro hombre y descubrí, al ver mis manos torpemente tiradas en la sábana a ambos lados de mi cuerpo, que había olvidado qué hacer con ellas.”
― Elizabeth McNeill, Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair