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: tradesmen...

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...

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity...

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...

Decadent cooks go one step further and make sculptures of the food itself. If life is to be spent in pursuit of the extravagant, the extreme, the grotesque, the bizarre, then one’s diet should reflect...

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent’s duties. But he was already past the...

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...

No, no, don’t let my vulnerable heart share in this sacrifice to lust! Let him disgust me before pleasing me! Let him be what others have been, an instrument that I can break before becoming...

I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some...

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...

You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded...

I love you too. If I ever try to hurt you again, lock me up, shoot me, do whatever you have to do…but don’t send me away,” he begged him never to separate them again.

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 –...

The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer

Due to its late nature, tomorrow morning will start after tonight. People say early morning, but it’s later than late at night, so I say it’s entirely too decadent for me to be a part...

It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain...

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.

We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.

The habit is now confirmed in me of spending the greater part of the day in sleep, while by night I wander far and wide through the city under the sedative influence of a tincture...

In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of...

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...

The knowledge we need, we are predisposed to seeking, intuitively.A fool does not know, what to do with importance, how to gauge importance, but they readily seek influence.The corrupt didn’t find the expanse of life...

Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and ‘correspondences’, rather than to realistically depict the world. … the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity....

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...

Two times twice now, I have been called arrogant, by the decadent.I’d rather be overly self confident, rather than overly self indulgent.

The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on...

Look, de Mazel, you’ve known him for years – hasn’t he been known to sleep for forty hours in two days?’ ‘Forty hours?’ ‘Certainly. He awoke at meal times, just to take nourishment, and afterwards...

I haven’t got purity, and I don’t think I ever did. I have always been, even as a child, a very decadent little person.

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...

Then Chameroy spoke. ‘You always put the blame on opium, but as I see it the case of Freneuse is much more complicated. Him, an invalid? No – a character from the tales of Hoffmann!...

The decadent artist markets other people’s pain

against nature,” the deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction.