Quotes from Anne Desclos

Story of O is a fairy tale for another world, a world where some part of me lived for a long time, a world that no longer exists except between the covers of a book.

To love is to live on the precipice.

A truly submissive woman is to be treasured, cherished and protected for it is only she who can give a man the gift of dominance.

I wrote 'The story of O' alone, for Dominique Aury, to interest him, to please him, to occupy him. I wasn't young, nor particularly pretty. I needed something which might interest a man like him.

Men are foolish to expect us to revere them, when, in the end, they amount to almost nothing.

Woman ... is the divine object, violated, endlessly sacrificed yet always reborn, whose only joy, achieved through a subtle interplay of images, lies in contemplation of herself.

I think that submissiveness can [be] and is a formidable weapon, which women will use as long as it isn't taken from them.

Debauchery conceived of as a kind of ascetic experience is not new, either for men or for women, but until Story of O no woman to my knowledge had said it.

By my makeup and temperament I wasn't really prey to physical desires. Everything happened in my head.