#decadence

(Decadent style) is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language... forcing itself to express in thought that which is most ineffable, and in form the vaguest and most fleeting contours; listening that it may translate them to the subtle confidences of the neuropath, to the avowals of aging and depraved passion, and to the singular hallucinations of the fixed idea verging on madness... In opposition to the classic style, it admits of shading, and these shadows teem and swarm with the larvae of superstitions, the haggard phantoms of insomnia, nocturnal terrors, remorse which starts and turns back at the slightest noise, monstrous dreams stayed only by impotence, obscure phantasies at which daylight would stand amazed, and all that the soul conceals of the dark, the unformed, and the vaguely horrible, in its deepest and furthest recesses. ↗

— Théophile Gautier

#decadents #age

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

#decadence #decay #death

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 decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art. ↗

— Asti Hustvedt

#bourgeois #decadence #decadent #deviant #literature-decay

Too much of a good thing can be wonderful! ↗

— Mae West

#decadence #excess #indulgence #innuendo #over-indulgence

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

#devil #horror #horror

Elaborate burial customs are a sure sign of decadence. ↗

— J.G. Ballard

#death #decadence #funerals #death

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 tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#life #mankind #beauty

First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined. ↗

— Milos Forman

#branded #dangerous #decadence #everybody #first

You gotta eat right, you gotta have healthy habits, you know, and balance out your decadence with a healthy lifestyle during the day. ↗

— Talib Kweli

#day #decadence #during #eat #gotta

A very special case. A few years more, and that pretty creature who you love too much, I think, will, without ever loving them, have known as many men as there are beads on her aunt's rosary. No happy medium! Either a nun or a monster! God's bosom or sensual passions! It would, perhaps, be better to put her in a convent, since we put hysterical women in the Saltpetriere! She does not know vice, she invents it!" That was ten years ago before the day our story begins and... Raoule was not a nun. ↗

— Rachilde

#decadents #hysteric #lust #nun #passion