quotes from the author
Today.s post dear reader is nothing more than a simple collection of quotes from magazine and newspaper interviews with Dominique Aury, the woman who wrote the Story of O under the pseudonym Pauline Réage. Interestingly, it turns out that the name Dominique Aury is itself a pseudonym, the author's actual real name was Anne Desclos.
"Who I am finally, if not the long silent part of someone, the secret and nocturnal part which has never betrayed itself in public by any thought, word, or deed, but communicates through subterranean depths of the imaginary with dreams as old as the world itself?"
~~ Dominique Aury
"I wasn’t young, I wasn’t pretty, it was necessary to find other weapons."
~~ Dominique Aury
"I think that submissiveness can [be] and is a formidable weapon, which women will use as long as it isn’t taken from them."
~~ Dominique Aury
“Is O used by René and Sir Stephen, or does she in fact use them, and…all those irons and chains and obligatory debauchery, to fulfill her own dream—that is, her own destruction and death? And, in some surreptitious way, isn’t she in charge of them? Doesn’t she bend them to her will?”
~~ Dominique Aury
"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.”
~~ Dominique Aury
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| Dominique Aury |
"I think I have a repressed bent for the military, I like discipline without question, specific schedules and duties."
~~ Dominique Aury
“By my makeup and temperament I wasn’t really prey to physical desires. Everything happened in my head.”
~~ Dominique Aury
"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."
~~ Dominique Aury
"I wrote it alone, for him, 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."
~~ Dominique Aury
“I found that stiffly saluting member, of which he was so proud, rather frightening, and to tell the truth I found his pride slightly comical. I thought that that must be embarrassing for him, and thought how much more pleasant it was to be a girl. That, by the way, is an opinion I still hold today.”
~~ Dominique Aury (describing her first real-life exposure to male anatomy)
She wrote the novel as a sort of love letter to her lover Jean Paulhan . . .
ReplyDeletelovely quotes! I love the novel. Read it twice, in Chinese and English. My next goal is to read it in French! (It's a hard one cause my French sucks...)
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