Remy de Gourmont

“ Hence the need of material progress, which is only grandiose vanity. At the end of the swiftest journeys, the man and the woman meet face to face, seeking in each other's eyes the motive of living, that is to say happiness.
Earth has become a narrow cage for you. However, birds that you are, it is your cage, and you are forbidden to leave it. You can paint it in the tenderest colours; it is a cage, and it is your cage. You will no longer go to heaven, the stars have fallen. If this heaven of which the childhood of humanity dreamed is a paradise, all the seats in it are taken. ”

“ The joys they bring us are not distributed with less niggardliness, but they have neither the same perfume nor the same color. Hope not to find again the smile that enchanted you. It is dead. It will not return to the face you love any more than the day of your birth will return. But may you at least hope to see once more the face you love, as it was. Alas! You will perhaps have the illusion of seeing it thus, but it will not be reality, for the days, as they vanish into the night, carry off with them somewhat of the countenances of men as a remembrance. ”

“ Hortense is a perfect violin; I will be her devoted bow. And between her hands, am not I also a good instrument? Oh! the fools who pass their life fighting against their passions! After that, what happens? When they see that the garden is almost flowerless, they come in melancholy fashion to smell the last rose: the wind passes and they find only a bush of leaves and thorns! But shouldn't I also ask: after that? May it not be that the only delicious thing in life is the constancy of an unconscious love? I know only too well that I love Hortense, and I know only too well why I love her. ”

“ With insects of superior talents it is, on the contrary, the female who carries off the male: the ant carries hers on her back, while he bends his abdomen into a bow toward her vulva; thus weighted, she flies, mounts, planes, then falls with him like a drop of water. He dies on the spot, the female gets up, returns to the nest, lays, before dying. The fetes of the ant are of the whole ant hill at once, the fall of the lovers like a golden cascade, and the resurrection of the females gleams in the sun like a russet foam. ”

“ A writer's talent is often nothing but the terrible faculty of retelling, in phrases that seem beautiful, the eternal clamors of mediocre humanity. Even gigantic geniuses, like Victor Hugo or Adam de Saint-Victor were destined to utter an admirable music whose grandeur consists in concealing the immense emptiness of the deserts: their soul is like the formless docile soul of deserts and crowds; they love, think, and desire the loves, thoughts, desires of all men and of all beasts; poets, they magnificently declaim what is not worth the trouble of being thought. ”

“ One day Leonor let fall, from the top of a ladder, a pocketbook from which a flood of papers—sketches, bills, letters, picture postcards—escaped. Rose picked them up, without giving them more than the discreetest glance, when Martinvast castle caught her eye. At the foot of the keep she found M. Hervart's 'love and kisses'. The blood came suddenly to her eyes; she turned the card over and read: "Mademoiselle Gratienne Leboeuf, Rue du Havre, Honfleur." She looked up; Leonor did not seem to have noticed the incident, and with a rapid gesture she folded up the card and slipped it into her bosom. ”

“ That evening, Hubert had had the courage to return to his home, to undress, to go to bed, to fall asleep, without admitting the intrusion, in his consciousness, of any thought. He was like a beaten dog filled with an irrational shame, and buried under the heavy covers, his eyes shut, he had attained sleep by a system of long and slow inhalings which, regulating the heart movement, calmed, then enfeebled the brain, like chloral.
In the morning, his adventure brought a smile to his face, and he even composed, in a tone of sad raillery, a series of little acrobatic verses, entitled: The Thread. ”

“ Even when she is silent, a woman continues to speak—often with a sincerity which her words lack. Even when she is motionless she continues to speak, and she is often more eloquent then than with words or with gestures. The form of her body makes her breathing a language. The rhythm of her bosom betrays the state of her soul and the degree of her emotion. No speech finds a man more sensitive. But their eyes have at their disposal a keyboard still more extended, though less effective. With her eyes, with the varied curves of her mute mouth, woman can express her inmost thought. ”

“ The thought of death is to him like any other thought, a rude playfellow to be mastered and trained to fitness for that free and harmonious game. The life of the brain, the noblest of all battles, that of a mind against the universe which it creates, has come to seem more important to him than the curiosities of beauty of which he was once enamoured. It has, perhaps, made him more of a thinker than an artist. In his desire to conquer his obsessions he has sometimes lost sight of the unity that is essential to art, a happy accident in thought. ”