“In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility...”

“The photograph, then, becomes a representation of a representation of a disease that represents. In other words, in order to produce the most perfect images of hysteria, the hysteric a woman whose...”

“The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textua...”

“The New or Future Eve is emptied of all inner life and turned into a shell. The bitter irony in this is that her perfection recalls nothing so much as a corpse.”

“By living a life against nature, the deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction.”

“The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themsel...”

“All too often, we mask truth in artifice, concealing ourselves for fear of losing the ones we love or prolonging a deception for those we wish to expose. We hide behind that which brings us comfort...”

“... the lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making.”

“For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological.”

“It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers th...”

“More than GM Foods I am afraid of GMM People. Genetically and Mentally Mutated People. The Entire Ecosystem Mutates.”

“We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.”

“With you I feel like I'm already good enough; I only have to believe it. I can't lose you again. He needed to make the confession because he was realising that Lachlan meant as much to him nowas he...”

“With you I feel like I'm already good enough; I only have to believe it. I can't lose you again.” He needed to make the confession because he was realising that Lachlan meant as much to him nowas h...”