131 Quotes About Decadence



  • Author Innokenty Annensky
  • Quote

    The game may have ended and the tomb have glided away,But the impressions on the heart are growing brighter;Oh, how I understood you: both the warmth's insinuation andThe splendor of flowerbeds where decay is showing through...("August")

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  • Author Laura Gentile
  • Quote

    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.

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  • Author Jean Lorrain
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    Ensor sees with his imagination, but his vision is perfectly accurate, of an almost geometric precision. He is one of the very few who can really see. Like you, he has an obsession with masks; he is a seer as you and I are. The common herd, of course thinks that he is mad.*****************You shall see what sort of man Ensor is, and what a marvellous insight he has into the invisible realm where our vices are created... those vices for which our faces make masks.

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  • Author Barry Pain
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    The baronet, in his old age, had been cast up by his vices on the shores of melancholy; heavy-eyed, grey-haired, bent, he seemed to pass through life as in a dream.("The Undying Thing")

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  • Author Asti Hustvedt
  • Quote

    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.

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