Against Nature Quotes
"She had long been a connoisseur of colours both simple and subtle."
"The walls he eventually decided to bind like books in large-grained crushed morocco."
"The main thing is to know how to set about it, to be able to concentrate your attention on a single detail."
"Nature, he used to say, has had her day."
"He could detect such inveterate stupidity, such hatred of his own ideas, such contempt for literature and art and everything he held dear."
"The hearty, blustering type on the other hand, the handsome, full-blooded sort, the strapping he-men who scorn the formalities of life and rush straight for their goal."
"It is only fair to add that, if his admiration for Virgil was anything but excessive and his enthusiasm for Ovid’s limpid effusions exceptionally discreet, the disgust he felt for the elephantine Horace’s vulgar twaddle was absolutely limitless."
"He always enjoyed rereading the panegyrics in which the good Bishop invokes the pagan deities in support of his pompous praises."
"These last were in their day the masters of their art; they filled the dying Empire with their cries."
"His predilection for Latin literature grew feebler as he neared the end of these two centuries."
"He despised the world, and this led him to give all he possessed to the poor, living on a crust of bread himself."
"A man with little or nothing to distinguish him from a lunatic or a savage."
"These drawings defied classification, most of them exceeding the bounds of pictorial art and creating a new type of fantasy, born of sickness and delirium."
"A sweet sadness, an almost languorous sorrow would gently take possession of his thoughts."
"Like an eremite, he was ripe for solitude, exhausted by life and expecting nothing more of it."
"His gloom would then be dissipated, as if by magic."
"This sinister picture, with its boot-polish blacks and cadaverous greens, fitted in with certain ideas Des Esseintes held on the subject of bedroom furniture and decoration."
"The truth is that I'm simply trying to make a murderer of the boy."
"He saw her become truly eloquent, speaking words full of sympathy for the poor, full of pity for the oppressed."
"He had been fascinated, and a whole crop of new ideas sprouted in his brain."
"He had followed every phase of this lamentable autumn, watching the human creature, skilled in self-torment and adept in self-deception, forcing its thoughts to cheat one another in order to suffer more acutely, and ruining in advance, thanks to its powers of analysis and observation, any chance of happiness it might have."
"Just as a wine-merchant can recognize a vintage from the taste of a single drop; just as a hop-dealer, the moment he sniffs at a sack, can fix the precise value of the contents; so Des Esseintes, after one brief sniff at a scent, could promptly detail the amounts of its constituents, explain the psychology of its composition, perhaps even give the name of the artist who created it and marked it with the personal stamp of his style."
"Sitting now at his dressing-room table, he was toying with the idea of creating a new bouquet when he was afflicted with that sudden hesitation so familiar to writers who, after months of idleness, make ready to embark on a new work."
"But the language of scents had not remained stationary since the 1830 epoch. It had continued to develop, had followed the march of the century, had advanced side-by-side with the other arts."
"The truth is that these flowers are made of taffeta and mounted on binding wire, while this vernal fragrance has come filtering in through cracks in the window-frame from the neighbouring factories where the Pinaud and St James perfumes are made."
"For the artisan worn out by the hard labour of the workshops, for the little clerk blessed with too many offspring, the illusion of enjoying a little fresh air is a practical possibility – thanks to these manufacturers."
"This strange and ill-defined condition cannot in fact arise in the mind of an unbeliever. It does not consist simply in riotous indulgence of the flesh, stimulated by bloody acts of cruelty, for in that case it would be nothing more than a deviation of the genetic instincts, a case of satyriasis developed to its fullest extent; it consists first and foremost in a sacrilegious manifestation, in a moral rebellion, in a spiritual debauch, in a wholly idealistic, wholly Christian aberration."
"He handled, one after the other, amber, Tonquin musk, with its overpowering smell, and patchouli, the most pungent of all vegetable perfumes, whose flower, in its natural state, gives off an odour of mildew and mould."
"Finally, when he had sufficiently savoured this spectacle, he frantically scattered exotic perfumes around him, emptied his vaporizers, quickened all his concentrated essences and gave free rein to all his balms, with the result that the suffocating room was suddenly filled with an insanely sublimated vegetation, emitting powerful exhalations, impregnating an artificial breeze with raging alcoholates – an unnatural yet charming vegetation, paradoxically uniting tropical spices such as the pungent odours of Chinese sandalwood and Jamaican hediosmia with French scents such as jasmine, hawthorn and vervain."
"But suddenly it struck him that the breeze was bringing with it a whiff of bergamot oil, mingled with a smell of jasmine, cassia and rose-water."
"This hypocrisy resulting from the extraordinary discrepancy between container and contents, between the liturgical form of the bottle and the utterly feminine, utterly modern soul inside it, had set him dreaming before now."
"He took a sip of the liqueur and felt a little better for a minute or two; but soon the fire a drop of wine had kindled in his innards blazed up again."
"Sitting on the grass, he gazed vacantly at the rows of vegetables the servants had planted."
"The sight put new life into Des Esseintes; the interest this fight aroused in him took his mind off his own sickly condition."
"What madness it was to beget children, reflected Des Esseintes."
"He sprang to his feet, ran to the kitchen and ordered his servants to send to the village for a round loaf, some white cheese, and a little garlic."
"That’ll give them a fore-taste of the sort of life they can expect!"
"Nor was it any use his having recourse to laudanum; instead of acting as a sedative, it irritated his nerves and thus robbed him of his sleep."
"He had bought this instrument, which was made of engraved and gilded copper, of German workmanship and dating from the seventeenth century, in a second-hand dealer’s in Paris."
"He grasped the true significance of all these cafés, realized that they corresponded to the state of mind of an entire generation and saw that they offered him a synthesis of the age."
"In short, society regarded as a crime the act of killing a creature endowed with life; and yet expelling a foetus simply meant destroying an animal that was less developed, less alive, certainly less intelligent and less prepossessing, than a dog or a cat."
"But he was fixed in his resolve to go no further, to stay where he was, far from the abominable life of Paris."
"Over the whole of Paris, from east to west and north to south, there stretched an unbroken network of confidence tricks, a chain of organized thefts acting one upon the other."
"Just then Des Esseintes’s man-servant interrupted these charitable reflections of his by bringing him the snack he had asked for on a silver-gilt salver."
"Des Esseintes shut himself up in his bedroom and stopped his ears against the sound of hammering outside, where the removal men were nailing up the packing-cases his servants had got ready."
"He would therefore have to wait till he reached that master of induction, the wise and wonderful Edgar Allan Poe, for whom his admiration had not suffered in the least from rereading his work."
"The doctor, who was imbued with all the prejudices of a man of the world, smiled and made for the door without answering."
"Des Esseintes had never been able to hum Des Mädchens Klage without nervous tears rising to his eyes."
"The doctors spoke of amusement and relaxation, but with whom, with what, did they expect him to have fun and enjoy himself?"
"‘So I have to choose between death and deportation!’ cried Des Esseintes in exasperation."