#l

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

(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood. ↗

— André Breton

#childhood #gothic #imagination #radcliffe #art

[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself. ↗

— Thornton Wilder

#life #art

The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life - the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself. ↗

— Robert M. Pirsig

#art

The main thing for inner contentment is to be in a state of grace. And there is an artistic state of grace, for art is a kind of religion. ↗

— Georges Rodenbach

#religion #the-bells-of-bruges #art

Why was I standing on the street when the window feel out of the building? Why did the bus run over me? Because it was my turn in the barrel, that's why. ↗

— Ellyn Bache

#art

Men think that it is essential that the "Nation" have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, wether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#men

I press my forehead against hers. "I'm so glad you showed up," I whisper. "You changed my life forever that night. ↗

— Colleen Hoover

#this-girl #change

The men were smashing windows and aiming their weapons through them. The driver had opened the door and was shouting for the women and children to get out and run and hide. But Ilina realized in some vague way that he never managed to actually say the word "hide." He really said, "Women and children, get out, get out, get out! Run and..." The clerk's wife thought it was odd that he had stopped in the middle of a sentence, and even stranger that she herself knew the word, heard the word "hide" in her head when the driver stopped talking. ↗

— Clark Zlotchew

#cia #dagestan #espionage-thriller #iran #novel

orgasm for women like coal( that takes lot of time to get heat) , and men like microwave..just push the button ↗

— Anshu

#men