[tenderman100]

(08-28-2012 08:42 AM)basilransom Wrote:  

Yes, they are. Western girls have been through the ringer so many times that romance will forever remain in the realm of fantasy for them. It may only take one or two failed (i.e. Ended) relationships with men to do it. French novelist Michel Houellebecq had an amazing passage about this:

• From the amorous point of view, Veronique belonged, as we all do, to a sacrificed generation. She had certainly been capable of love; she wished to still be capable it, I’ll say that for her; but it was no longer possible. A scarce, artificial and belated phenomenon, love can only blossom under certain mental conditions, rarely conjoined, and totally opposed to the freedom of morals which characterizes the modern era. Veronique had known too many discotheques, too many lovers; such a way of life impoverishes a human being, inflicting sometimes serious and always irreversible damage. Love as a kind of innocence and as a capacity for other sex in a single loved being rarely, resists a year of sexual immorality, and never two. In reality the successive sexual experiences accumulated during adolescence undermine and rapidly destroy all possibility of projection of an emotional and romantic sort; progressively, and in fact extremely quickly, one becomes as capable of love as an old slag. And so one leads, obviously, a slag’s life; in ageing one becomes less seductive, and on that account, bitter. One is jealous of the younger, and so one hates them. Condemned to remain unvowable, this hatred festers and becomes increasingly fervent; then it dies down and fades away, just as everything fades away. All that remains is resentment and disgust, sickness and the anticipation of death.

A related post: whytherearenogirls.blogspot.com/2010/04/35-great-white-buffalo.html?m=1

Great great GREAT quote. What novel is that from?