“ The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance. Charles Baudelaire
“ I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too lo… Isaac Asimov
“ Decline is also a form of voluptuousness, just like growth. Autumn is just as sensual as springtime. There is as much greatness in dying as in procreation. Iwan Goll
“ I was performing my ritual of sipping tea, shooting flirtatious glances and planning murder Mingmei Yip
“ March 1898What a strange dream I had last night! I wandered in the warm streets of a port, in the low quarter of some Barcelona or Marseille. The streets were noisome, with their freshly-heaped piles… Jean Lorrain
“ 8 April 1891The obscenity of nostrils and mouths; the ignominious cupidity of smiles and women encountered in the street; the shifty baseness on every side, as of hyenas and wild beasts ready to bite:… Jean Lorrain
“ Inside my soul a treasure is buried.The key is mine and only mine.How right you are, you drunken monster!I know: the truth is in the wine.("The Unknown Lady") Alexander Blok
“ Endless love and voluptuous appetite pervaded this stifling nave in which settled the ardent sap of the tropics. Renée was wrapped in the powerful bridals of the earth that gave birth to these dark gr… Emile Zola
“ I came there again another time. And I looked many times again. I was filled with consolation, with my consolation.The thirty-three abominations were truthful. They were the truth. They were life. The… Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal
“ By living a life “against nature,” the deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction. Asti Hustvedt
“ The dense fog manifests ever-living gravestones, the tunes of decadence, the hearts that were doomed to dance alone. Here lies untouched beauty, a brittle dream, an unseen sea-born nightmare, an isola… Laura Gentile
“ Against a set of desolate scenery, amid spectral crags and livid mountains of ash, beneath the funereal daylight of slopes illuminated in blue, she personified the spirit of the witches' sabbat. Morbi… Jean Lorrain
“ I often think about this, that is, I imagine to myself that here is Vera, dead, totally motionless, lying on the table, in a coffin... and I too, of course can no longer live. But for some reason this… Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal
“ The madness of the eyes is the lure of the abyss. Sirens lurk in the dark depths of the pupils as they lurk at the bottom of the sea, that I know for sure - but I have never encountered them, and I am… Jean Lorrain
“ The Marquis de V... - whose falsetto voice and little watery eyes I have always detested - was saying to me with a wicked smile: 'Then again, the master gymnast might break his neck at any moment. Wha… Jean Lorrain
“ 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… Remy de Gourmont
“ Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory to… Gustave Flaubert
“ Our way would seem quite familiar to the Romans, more by far than the Greek way. Socrates in the Symposium, when Alcibiades challenged him to drink two quarts of wine, could have done so or not as he… Edith Hamilton
“ (visions) of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through t… George Eliot
