Quote Bag: Remy de Gourmont

His one and only subject matter was sex; he was deeply fascinated by the essential capriciousness of the sexual impulse, by the ill-effects of social and religious repression of sexuality, and by the intellectual strategies which might maximize the quasi-transcendental experience of sexual rapture.

– Francis Amery

I am not listening. What does it matter to me whether she is a mere girl or a marquise, or both? I am thinking: here is a companion for the game of elementary sensations, flesh malleable to intimate experiences, and a soul sufficiently becalmed by ennui to accept navigation towards that isle where fabulous creatures rejoice in fabulous creativity…

It becomes certain that human intelligence, far from being the object of creation, is only an accident and that moral ideas are merely vegetable parasites born from an excess of nutrition.

"Style" means visual memory and metaphoric capacity, combined in variable proportions with emotive memory and all the obscure contribution of the other senses.

Mallarme’s work is the most marvelous pretext for reverie which has yet been offered to men weary of many heavy and useless affirmations. It is a poetry full of doubts, of shifting nuances and ambiguous perfumes, and it is perhaps the only poetry that will be able, henceforward, to give us pleasure. And if the word decadence really summed up all these autumnal, twilight charms, we should welcome it and even make it one of the keys of the viol. But it is dead, the master is dead, the penultimate is dead.

– Remy de Gourmont