Quotes from Against Nature

“Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with any author or scholar.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“(Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“I seek new perfumes, ampler blossoms, untried pleasures.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“…he noticed that the free thinkers, the doctrinaires of the bourgeoisie, people who claimed every liberty that they might stifle the opinions of others, were greedy and shameless puritans whom, in education, he esteemed inferior to the corner shoemaker.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“The belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for his soul; the conviction that human life is nothing more than an uncertain struggle between heaven and hell; the faith in two opposed entities, Satan and Christ - all this was bound to engender those internal discords in which the soul, excited by the incessant fighting, stimulated as it were by the constant promises and threats, ends up by giving in and prostitutes itself to whichever of the two combatants has been more obstinate in its pursuit.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“No longer was she merely the dancing-girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body; who breaks the will, masters the mind of a King by the spectacle of her quivering bosoms, heaving belly and tossing thighs; she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles, - a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“...he shrunk more and more from the realities of life and above all from the society of his day which he regarded with an ever growing horror,--a detestation which had reacted strongly on his literary and artistic tastes; he refused, as far as possible, to have anything to do with pictures and books whose subjects were in any way connected with modern existence.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“...indeed it is very true that, just as the finest air in the world is vulgarized beyond all bearing once the public has taken to hum it and the street organs to play it, so the work of art that has appealed to the sham connoisseurs, that is admired by the uncritical, that is not content to rouse the enthusiasm of only a chosen few, becomes for this very reason, in the eyes of the elect, a thing polluted, commonplace, almost repulsive.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“He lived within himself, nourished by his own substance, like some torpid creature which hibernates in caves. Solitude had reacted upon his brain like a narcotic. After having strained and enervated it, his mind had fallen victim to a sluggishness which annihilated his plans, broke his will power and invoked a cortège of vague reveries to which he passively submitted.
The confused medley of meditations on art and literature in which he had indulged since his isolation, as a dam to bar the current of old memories, had been rudely swept away, and the onrushing, irresistible wave crashed into the present and future, submerging everything beneath the blanket of the past, filling his mind with an immensity of sorrow, on whose surface floated, like futile wreckage, absurd trifles and dull episodes of his life.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“The Louis XIII style in perfumery, composed of the elements dear to that period - orris-powder, musk, civet and myrtle-water, already known by the name of angel-water - was scarcely adequate to express the cavalierish graces, the rather crude colours of the time which certain sonnets by Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later on, with the aid of myrrh and frankincense, the potent and austere scents of religion, it became almost possible to render the stately pomp of the age of Louis XIV, the pleonastic artifices of classical oratory, the ample, sustained, wordy style of Bossuet and the other masters of the pulpit. Later still, the blase, sophisticated graces of French society under Louis XV found their interpreters more easily in frangipane and marechale, which offered in a way the very synthesis of the period. And then, after the indifference and incuriosity of the First Empire, which used eau-de-Cologne and rosemary to excess, perfumery followed Victor Hugo and Gautier and went for inspiration to the lands of the sun; it composed its own Oriental verses, its own highly spiced salaams, discovered intonations and audacious antitheses, sorted out and revived forgotten nuances which it complicated, subtilized and paired off, and in short resolutely repudiated the voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieux, its Baour-Lormians, the vulgar distillers of its poems.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“What he wanted was colours which would appear stronger and clearer in artificial light. He did not particularly care if they looked crude or insipid in daylight, for he lived most of his life at night, holding that night afforded greater intimacy and isolation and that the mind was truly roused and stimulated only by awareness of the dark; moreover he derived a peculiar pleasure from being in a well-lighted room when all the surrounding houses were wrapped in sleep and darkness, a sort of enjoyment in which vanity may have played some small part, a very special feeling of satisfaction familiar to those who sometimes work late at night and draw aside the curtains to find that all around them the world is dark, silent and dead.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“There is not one single invention of (Nature's), however subtle or impressive it may be thought to be, that the human spirit cannot create; no forest of Fontainebleu or moonlit scene that cannot be produced with a floodlit stage set; no waterfall that hydraulics cannot imitate so perfectly as to be indistinguishable from the original; no rock that papier-mâché cannot copy; no flower that specious taffetas and delicately painted papers cannot rival! There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artiface.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“He cared little for commonly experienced emotions, for everyday associations of ideas, now that the closing of his mind had grown more pronounced, and he allowed access only to the most highly refined sensations, to crises of faith and to violent disorders of the senses.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“and if it be true that the loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own, the work of art which does not remain indifferent to the spurious artists, which is not contested by fools, and which is not satisfied with awakening the enthusiasm of the few, by this very fact becomes profaned, trite, almost repulsive to the initiate.
This promiscuity in admiration, furthermore, was one of the greatest sources of regret in his life. Incomprehensible successes had forever spoiled for him many pictures and books once cherished and dear. Approved by the mob, they began to reveal imperceptible defects to him, and he rejected them, wondering meanwhile if his perceptions were not growing blunted.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“Movement, after all, seemed futile to him. He felt that imagination could easily be substituted for the vulgar realities of things. It was possible, in his opinion, to gratify the most extravagant, absurd desires by a subtle subterfuge, by a slight modification of the object of one's wishes.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“And yet the point of view from which his ideas on art had sprung was a simple one: for him, literary schools did not exist; the only thing that mattered was the temperament of the artist; the only thing of interest was the way his brain worked, regardless of the subject he was treating.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“literature, in fact, had been concerned with virtues and vices of a perfectly healthy sort, the regular functioning of brains of a normal conformation, the practical reality of current ideas, with never a thought for morbid depravities and other-worldly aspirations; in short, the discoveries of these anaylists of human nature stopped short at the speculations good or bad, classified by the church; their efforts amounted to no more than the humdrum researches of a botanist who watches closely the expected development of ordinary flora planted in common or garden soil.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“From black-rimmed plates they ate turtle soup and eaten Russian
rye bread, ripe Turkish olives, caviar, salted mullet-roe, smoked
Frankfurt black puddings, game in gravies the colour of liquorice
and boot-blacking truffled sauces, chocolate caramel creams, plum
puddings, nectarines, preserved fruits, mulberries and heart-cherries;
from dark coloured glasses they drank the wines of Limagne and
Rousillon, of Tenedoes, Val de Peñas and Oporto, and, after the coffee
and the walnut cordial they enjoyed kvass, porters and stouts.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them would might feel obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle, into a sphere where sublimated sensations would arouse within him an unexpected commotion, the causes of which he would strive to patiently and even vainly to analyse.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“And whenever they came back to his lips, these exquisite, funereal laments conjured up, in his mind, a place on the outskirts of a city, a mean and voiceless place where silently, in the distance, lines of men and women, wearied and bowed down by life, were disappearing into the twilight, while he himself, surfeited with bitterness and replete with disgust, felt himself alone, utterly alone, in the midst of a tearful Nature, overwhelmed by an inexpressible melancholy, by a relentless anguish, the mysterious intensity of which precluded all consolation, all pity, all repose.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“It was here that she was indeed Woman, for here she gave rein to her ardent and cruel temperament. She was living, more refined and savage, more execrable and exquisite. She more energetically awakened the dulled senses of man, more surely bewitched and subdued his power of will, with the charm of a tall venereal flower, on sacrilegious beds, in impious hothouses.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“En effet, lorsque l'époque où un homme de talent est obligé de vivre est plate et bête, l'artiste est, à son insu même, hanté par la nostalgie d'un autre siècle.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“The pleasure of travel - existing as it largely does only in recollection and almost never in the present, at the actual moment when it is taking place-
Besides, he considered travel to be pointless, believing that the imagination could easily compensate for the vulgar reality of actual experience.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

“One of these, bearing the name of Crampton, is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass corset, and supple catlike movements; a smart golden blonde whose extraordinary grace can be quite terrifying when she stiffens her muscles of steel, sends the sweat pouring down her steaming flanks, sets her elegant wheels spinning in their wide circles, and hurtles away, full of life, at the head of an express or a boat-train.
The other, Engerth by name, is a strapping saturnine brunette given to uttering raucous, guttural cries, with a thickset figure encased in armor-plating of cast iron; a monstrous creature with her disheveled mane of black smoke and her six wheels coupled together low down, she gives an indication of her fantastic strength when, with an effort that shakes the very earth, she slowly and deliberately drags along her heavy train of goods-wagons.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, quote from Against Nature

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