#decade

The South: What is this place? What's different about it? Is it different anymore? Good questions. Old ones, too. People have been asking them for decades. Some of us even make our living by asking them, but we still don't agree about the answers. ↗

— John Shelton Reed

#agree #answers #anymore #asking #been

The famous courtesan Clarimonde died recently, as the result of an orgy which lasted eight days and eight nights. It was something infernally magnificent. They revived the abominations of the feasts of Belshazzar and Cleopatra. Great God! what an age this is in which we live! The guests were served by swarthy slaves speaking an unknown tongue, who to my mind had every appearance of veritable demons; the livery of the meanest among them might have served as a gala-costume for an emperor. There have always been current some very strange stories concerning this Clarimonde, and all her lovers have come to a miserable or a violent end. It has been said that she was a ghoul, a female vampire; but I believe that she was Beelzebub in person. ↗

— Théophile Gautier

#orgy #vampire #age

Lady Sarah Henbery was his hostess, and the inspired projector of a new scheme of existence (that was, in effect, the repudiation of any scheme) that had become quite the 'thing.' She had found life an arbitrary design - a coil of days (like fancy pebbles, dull or sparkling) set in the form of a mainspring, and each gem responsible to the design. Then she had said, 'To-day shall not follow yesterday or precede to-morrow'; and she had taken her pebbles from their setting and mixed them higgledy-piggledy, and so was in the way to wear or spend one or the other as caprice moved her. And she became without design and responsibility, and was thus able to indulge a natural bent towards capriciousness to the extent that - having a face for each and every form of social hypocrisy and licence - she was presently hardly to be put out of countenance by the extremist expression of either. It followed that her reunions were popular with worldlings of a certain order. ("The Accursed Cordonnier") ↗

— Bernard Capes

#decadent #decadents #design

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 which has become necessary to my life ↗

— M.P. Shiel

#decadent #drugs #night #sleep #life

Poverty fled, she who gives birth to virile men. ↗

— Marcus Annaeus Lucanus

#manliness #poverty #upbringing #men

The wonderful thing about acting is you move along with your decade. The older you get, the more interesting the parts you get to play and you bring more of your personal experience to the part. ↗

— Francesca Annis

#acting #along #bring #decade #experience

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time. ↗

— Harold Acton

#autobiographies #best #biographies #decades #fiction

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

Even IBM can't stand in the way of progress... for more than a decade. ↗

— Craig Bruce

#even #ibm #more #progress #stand

... he preferred being stimulated to being bored. ↗

— Ruth Harris

#decades #life-and-living #life