Astarte has come again, more powerful than before. She possesses me. She lies in wait for me.December 97My cruelty has also returned: the cruelty which frightens me. It lies dormant for months, for years, and...

I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.

The baronet, in his old age, had been cast up by his vices on the shores of melancholy; heavy-eyed, grey-haired, bent, he seemed to pass through life as in a dream.(“The Undying Thing”)

We are precarious. Which is to say some good things (accumulation of diverseknowledges, skills and abilities through work and life experiences in permanentconstruction), and a lot of bad ones (vulnerability, insecurity, poverty, socialexposure).

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...

I think Gummy Bears should be the universal symbol for peace, because peace leads to prosperity, prosperity leads to decadence, and decadence leads to diabetes.

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless...

If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!

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...

Wie ich heimschritt bemerkte ich mit einemmal vor mir meinen eigenen Schatten so wie ich den Schatten des anderen Krieges hinter dem jetzigen sah. Er ist durch all diese Zeit nicht mehr von mir gewichen...

Through silent alleys where dark shadows fleeted past them like forest beasts on the prowl; through bustling market-places where bloaters predominated, into crammed gin-palaces where the gas flashed over faces whereon was stamped the indelible...

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 isolated acheirous harf, fishbones without...

Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence. The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own Decadence.”He tells how the Persians were felled, how the Romans collapsed because...

Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence.

Stop sleeping, Get to work! You will have much time to sleep when you die.

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.

It is said that one of his acquaintances – an old school-friend and a painter as highly-valued and as fashionable as himself – became an idiot in less than two years as a result of...

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal...

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...

I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.

I have no idea how long Quisser was gone from the table. My attention became fully absorbed by the other faces in the club and the deep anxiety they betrayed to me, an anxiety that...

The beauty of the twentieth century is the charm of the hospital, the grace of the cemetery, of consumption and emaciation. I admit that I have submitted to it all; worse, I have loved with...

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

For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological.

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 –...

Cavenaugh rubbed his hands together and smiled his sunny smile.’I like that idea. It’s reassuring. If we can have no secrets, it means we can’t, after all, go so far afield as we might,’ he...

Living in a world where people measure their happiness by self-indulgence and decadence, Is like watching a whole society being pushed into the abyss of perpetual decay and aberrations.

Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!

Jerusalem was capital of southern Israel, known then as Judah. Isn’t it true that there’s always a rivalry between north and south? North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, Northern and Southern Ireland, Yankees...

In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers’ wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip...

prevented the matrona from spotting the engorged cock that I would occasionally press against the bedridden patient”.