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It is a foregone conclusion that if you violate the rules covering sexuality, society will get you, as Mrs. W Harton would demonstrate so much more subtly in the Age of Innocence; and Henry James would subtly deny since he knew, in a way that Howells did not, that the forbidden cake could be both safely eaten and kept. p 51

It is certain that our manners and customs go for more in life than our qualities. The price that we pay for civilization is the fine yet impassable differentiation of these. Perhaps we pay too much; but it will not be possible to persuade those who have the difference in their favor that this is so. (The Rise of Silas Lapham).

NYT Dec 2.1983 p. 18 John Russell

Contrary to what is often supposed, Paris is the very devil to paint ... the city

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is just too grand, its inherent poetry too dense and the weight of the past too over-whelming for painters to tackle it head on.

Baudelaire diary entry quoted in Romantics and Romanticism by Le Bris p 144

The art of love bears a great resemblance to the tortoise and to a surgical operation... Do you hear those sighs, prelude to a tragedy of dishonor, those groans, those cries, those grasps? Who has not uttered them, who has not irresistibly wrung them from another? And what do you thing is worse in the question supplied by careful torturers? Those upturned sleepwalker's eyes, those limbs that ripple and stiffen as if under the shock of a galvanic cell, that intoxication, delirium, opium, in their most furious results, will surely not give