Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.

She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.

So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.

Tandis qu'il se mouvait sur elle, en avant puis en arrière, il lui semblait décrire sans cesse le même mouvement, de l'enfance à l'âge adulte puis en sens inverse, et encore une fois du petit garçon qui regardait misérablement un gigantesque corps de femme à l'homme qui étreint ce corps et le dompte. Ce mouvement, qui mesure habituellement quinze centimètres à peine, était long comme trois décennies.

She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.

In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.

The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of love-making and of the universe.

and she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies.

The situation is very slightly solemn and thus embarrassing, as are all such situations when after the initial lovemaking, the lovers confront a future they are suddenly required to take on.