Emmanuelle De Maupassant Quotes

#1. Drink the sun's warmth and the moon's icy glitter, and taste that which the dead and the yet-to-be-born cannot: the potency of this world.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#2. she feels still that grasp upon her ankle as if it were a circlet of iron: the embodiment of matrimony. She would be pinned, like the museum butterflies. He would remain free to flutter.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#3. An 'usband should be plain enough to sit at his settle, and simple-minded enough to accept the stew on his plate, rather than looking round ev'ry corner for a more succulent chop,' declares Elsie.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#4. Forsaking all other thoughts, he rutted into her, in a fashion more animal than human. His eruption he held fast within, so that she squirmed against the sensation before accepting her own fall into oblivion, her walls pulsing to an echoing rhythm.

from The Gentlemen's Club

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#5. Crook your finger;
they'll come closer.
Pull the covers tighter to your chin;
in beside you they'll creep.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#6. She is drawn to the river, and all its hideous, dead-eyed treasures: rot-bloated cats, and cold-meat corpses of unwanted infants, eels plucking at their tender fingers and toes.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#7. He is a man-beast, carnivore incarnate, motivated by carnal avarice and wearing only the mask of civility.

She could sip from that cup.

It is his presumption that deters her: his belief that he has already caught Maud in his paw.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#8. Listen,
listen with your eyes,
and your lips.
Listen with your skin,
and your blood.
Can you hear us,
at the edges?

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#9. The cold is waiting to ooze through the soles of your shoes. Maggot-damp, this city is festering: home to hollow faces of grey flesh. They stare from windows unclean, into the sun never reaches: dismal lives lived in dismal constriction.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#10. There is no joy greater than the triumph of living.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#11. Girls barely budding open their legs to make a living, alongside the toothless and rancid of breath; hair thick with lice, they all find customers if the price is right, against the wall or on sheets well-soiled. Their holes cost but a shilling. Skins grow thick and claws sharp.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#12. We who are beyond the mortal world see many things from the edges; we hear the subtle shifts of rhythm in the beat of a blackening heart.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant

#13. And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched him as he watched, gazing where he should not.

Emmanuelle De Maupassant