#decade

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

The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations. ↗

— Jean Lorrain

#cowardice #decadence #government #law #nature

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

I can feel the 60S looming. In my profession, I've just moved along with my age. By thinking in decades, rather than whether someone's 42 or 47, you can give yourself a whole 10 years to turn yourself around in. ↗

— Francesca Annis

#along #around #decades #feel #give

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade. ↗

— Hannah Arendt

#authority #day #decade #defiance #established

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

Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today. ↗

— Angela Davis

#couple #decades #evolved #increasing #itself

I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills... all apart from cooking. ↗

— Heston Blumenthal

#apart #art #best #born #british