That's all right! That's all right!' But for a minute or two it wasn't really. All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but th… - Ford Madox Ford

All feminine claws, he said to himself, are sheathed in velvet; but they can hurt a good deal if they touch you on the sore places of the defects of your qualities — even merely with the velvet.

By God!’ Christopher exclaimed. ‘I loathe your whole beastly buttered-toast, mutton-chopped, carpet-slippered, rum-negused comfort as much as I loathe your beastly Riviera-palaced, chauffeured, hydraulic-lifted, hot-house aired beastliness of fornication.…

Only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst.

Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man — the man with the right to existence — a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbor’s womankind? I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or all we meant to act on impulse alone? It is all a darkness.