{"quotes":[{"text":"The dense fog manifests ever-living gravestones, the tunes of decadence, the hearts that were doomed to dance alone. Here lies untouched beauty, a brittle dream, an unseen sea-born nightmare, an isolated acheirous harf, fishbones without flesh, a face without letters, the hypnotic power o Apollonian destruction. Ashes kiss the grapefruit essential oil skin, the soul beats with eaten sons and daughters, soaking wet serpents with cuspid tongues lollop for legendary goddesses.","author":"Laura Gentile","tags":["dance","decadence","doomed","fog","hearts"],"id":3721,"author_id":"Laura+Gentile"},{"text":"He asked her, 'Why do you feel sorry for me, Old Woman?'The Old Woman stood beside him and looked out the window at the Garden, so beautiful, flowering and everywhere illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and said, 'I feel sorry for you, dear Youth, because I know where you are gazing and what you are waiting for. I feel sorry for you and your mother.'Perhaps because of these words, or perhaps because of something else, there was a change in the Youth's mood. The Garden, flowering behind the high fence below his window, and exuding a wonderful fragrance, suddenly seemed somehow strange to him; and an ominous sensation, a sudden fear, gripped his heart with a violent palpitation, like heady and languid fragrances rising from brilliant flowers.'What is happening?' he wondered in confusion.('The Poison Garden').","author":"Valery Bryusov","tags":["decadence","garden","innocence","poison","youth"],"id":13486,"author_id":"Valery+Bryusov"},{"text":"I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and decay - as your world has done.","author":"Isaac Asimov","tags":["complacency","death","decadence","immortality","longevity","progress"],"id":32061,"author_id":"Isaac+Asimov"},{"text":"Two times twice now, I have been called arrogant, by the decadent.I'd rather be overly self confident, rather than overly self indulgent.","author":"Justin K. McFarlane Beau","tags":["arrogance","arrogant","conceit","confidence","decadence","decadent","indulgence"],"id":34617,"author_id":"Justin+K.+McFarlane+Beau"},{"text":"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.","author":"Rachilde","tags":["decadence","decadents","hysteric","lust","nun","passion","vice","woman"],"id":34842,"author_id":"Rachilde"},{"text":"Decadent cooks go one step further and make sculptures of the food itself. If life is to be spent in pursuit of the extravagant, the extreme, the grotesque, the bizarre, then one's diet should reflect the fact. Life, meals, everything must be as artificial as possible - in fact works of art. So why not begin by eating a few statues?","author":"Medlar Lucan","tags":["cooking","decadence","decadent","food"],"id":38734,"author_id":"Medlar+Lucan"},{"text":"You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep.","author":"Alfred de Musset","tags":["decadence","decadent","god","life"],"id":58096,"author_id":"Alfred+de+Musset"},{"text":"There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why honest gazes are only to be found in portraits.The faded and weary eyes of martyrs, expressions tortured by ecstasy, imploring and suffering eyes, some resigned, others desperate... The gazes of saints, mendicants and princesses in exile, with pardoning smiles... The gazes of the possessed, the chosen and the hysterical... And sometimes of little girls, the eyes of Ophelia and Canidia, the eyes of virgins and witches... As you live in the museums, what eternal life, dolorous and intense, shines out of you! Like precious stones enshrined between the painted eyelids of masterpieces, you disturb us across time and across space, receivers of the dream which created you!You have souls, but they are those of the artists who wished you into being, and I am delivered to despair and mortification because I have drunk the draught of poison congealed in the irises of your eyes.The eyes of portraits ought to be plucked out.","author":"Jean Lorrain","tags":["decadence","eyes","gaze","honesty","paintings","portraits"],"id":58236,"author_id":"Jean+Lorrain"},{"text":"Jerusalem was capital of southern Israel, known then as Judah. Isn't it true that there's always a rivalry between north and south? North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, Northern and Southern Ireland, Yankees and Rebels, uptown and downtown. Somebody please tell me why that is? Maybe southerners get too much sun, like Mr. Sock over there, frying his threads, and northerners don't get enough (although I hardly think northern Israel a cool spot in the shade), but southern peoples--tropical and downtown types--always seem to lean toward decadence, whereas uptown, in the north, progress is favored. Decadence and progress obviously are at odds.","author":"Tom Robbins","tags":["decadence","jerusalem","north-vs-south","northerners","progress","rivalry","southerners"],"id":66442,"author_id":"Tom+Robbins"},{"text":"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.","author":"Asti Hustvedt","tags":["artifice","decadence","decadent","illusion","language","literature"],"id":72652,"author_id":"Asti+Hustvedt"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":76,"pages":8,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}