#decadence

They had...finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end. ↗

— Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly

#death #decadence #dissolution #life #death

Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress each paternal beard and cheek; to poison them, even at the risk of perishing ourselves; to do as those Spanish monks did, who drank death in order that they might persuade the French rabble which had violated their monastery to do likewise. ↗

— Remy de Gourmont

#life #mankind #courage

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice. ↗

— Asti Hustvedt

#decadence #decadent #illusion #language #literature

(Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions. ↗

— Joris-Karl Huysmans

#decadence #decadent #sickness #nature

In all nations an exceptional man exists that compensates the deficiencies of the remainder. In those moments, when humanity is found collectively in a state of decadence, there always remain those exceptional beings as point of reference. ↗

— Augusto Roa Bastos

#always #beings #collectively #compensates #decadence

By living a life “against nature,” the deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction. ↗

— Asti Hustvedt

#decadent #deviant #hero #pervert #life

The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic. ↗

— James Thurber

#between #brutal #decadence #difference #our

America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization. ↗

— John O'Hara

#barbarism #being #civilization #country #decadence

Because I'm a Karamazov. Because when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#beauty #decadence #falling #humiliation #beauty

(Decadent style) is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language... forcing itself to express in thought that which is most ineffable, and in form the vaguest and most fleeting contours; listening that it may translate them to the subtle confidences of the neuropath, to the avowals of aging and depraved passion, and to the singular hallucinations of the fixed idea verging on madness... In opposition to the classic style, it admits of shading, and these shadows teem and swarm with the larvae of superstitions, the haggard phantoms of insomnia, nocturnal terrors, remorse which starts and turns back at the slightest noise, monstrous dreams stayed only by impotence, obscure phantasies at which daylight would stand amazed, and all that the soul conceals of the dark, the unformed, and the vaguely horrible, in its deepest and furthest recesses. ↗

— Théophile Gautier

#decadents #age