Quotes from book

A Short History of Decay

“Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.”

“I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.”

“Society: an inferno of saviors!”

“We define only out of despair, we must have a formula… to give a facade to the void.”

“To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.”

“Reality is a creation of our excesses.”

“Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.”

“Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”

“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.”

“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”

“By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.”

“The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.”

“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”

“Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.”

“We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.”

“I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless.”

“Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.”

“Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle…”

“This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.”