#decadent

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

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 of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions ↗

— Frantz Fanon

#decadent #u-s #united-states

I became the toast of London. A lot of people I met came from these really decadent families where the married men were gay and no one thought anything about it. ↗

— Robert Mapplethorpe

#anything #became #came #decadent #families

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 their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice. ↗

— Asti Hustvedt

#decadence #decadent #illusion #language #literature

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

I was raised in a solidly upper-middle class family who had really strong values and excess was not one of the things that my family put up with. And there's something wildy decadent about the young-star lifestyle, and I just don't really see the point. ↗

— Anne Hathaway

#class #class family #decadent #excess #family

In the final analysis, the incident is seen as originating from an emotional expression of the frustration and anger of the proud people of China who had been subject to ever increasing oppression from without and decadent corruption from within. ↗

— Chen Ning Yang

#anger #been #china #corruption #decadent

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 was not of the natural, existential sort but one that was caused by peculiar concerns of an uncanny nature. What a season is upon us, these faces seemed to say. And no doubt their voices would have spoken directly of certain peculiar concerns had they not been intimidated into weird equivocations and double entendres by the fear of falling victim to the same kind of unnatural affliction that had made so much trouble in the mind of the art critic Stuart Quisser. Who would be next? What could a person say these days, or even think, without feeling the dread of repercussion from powerfully connected groups and individuals? I could almost hear their voices asking, "Why here, why now?" But of course they could have just as easily been asking, "Why not here, why not now?" It would not occur to this crowd that there were no special rules involved; it would not occur to them, even though they were a crowd of imaginative artists, that the whole thing was simply a matter of random, purposeless terror that converged upon a particular place at a particular time for no particular reason. On the other hand, it would also not have occurred to them that they might have wished it all upon themselves, that they might have had a hand in bringing certain powerful forces and connections into our district simply by wishing them to come. They might have wished and wished for an unnatural evil to fall upon them but, for a while at least, nothing happened. Then the wishing stopped, the old wishes were forgotten yet at the same time gathered in strength, distilling themselves into a potent formula (who can say!), until one day the terrible season began. Because had they really told the truth, this artistic crowd might also have expressed what a sense of meaning (although of a negative sort), not to mention the vigorous thrill (although of an excruciating type), this season of unnatural evil had brought to their lives. ("Gas Station Carnivals") ↗

— Thomas Ligotti

#decadence #decadents #evil #fate #horror

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

— James Elroy Flecker

#literature #nostalgia #age

It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in "The King in Yellow," all felt that human nature could not bear the strain nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterwards with more awful effect. ↗

— Robert W. Chambers

#decadents #art