#perversity

In the sphere of thought, absurdity and perversity remain the masters of the world, and their dominion is suspended only for brief periods. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#brief #dominion #masters #only #periods

Perversion is just another form of art. It's like painting or drawing or sculpting. Except instead of paint, us perverts use sex as our medium.  ↗

— C.M. Stunich

#erotic #erotic-literature #erotica #excite #form-of-art

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

An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market. ↗

— Neal Stephenson

#progress #marketing

The Climber did not interfere. He praised the education I had received, and approved greatly of our immersions, just after birth, by the Sages, adding maliciously that nothing so sharpened the wits as a passion somewhat out of the common. (“The Story of Princess Zulkais and the Prince Kalilah”) ↗

— William Beckford

#perversity #education

They who do not understand that a man may be brought to hope that which of all things is the most grievous to him, have not observed with sufficient closeness the perversity of the human mind. ↗

— Anthony Trollope

#brought #closeness #grievous #him #hope

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right. ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#baseness #character #country #every #every nation

Could that have been what happened to the human race - a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years? ↗

— Clifford D. Simak

#could #had #happened #hardly #human

All men are, at times, influenced by inexplicable sentiments. Ideas haunt them in spite of all their efforts to discard them. Prepossessions are entertained, for which their reason is unable to discover any adequate cause. The strength of a belief, when it is destitute of any rational foundation, seems, of itself, to furnish a new ground for credulity. We first admit a powerful persuasion, and then, from reflecting on the insufficiency of the ground on which it is built, instead of being prompted to dismiss it, we become more forcibly attached to it. ↗

— Charles Brockden Brown

#obsession #perversity #men

Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity's sake, and all the better for that; the image created because an artist gets tired of reasons sometimes, and wants to dredge up some picture he's been haunted by, and parade it like a new tattoo. I go with it, readily. ↗

— Clive Barker

#writing-advice #writing-craft #writing-craft