“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 fertilit...”

“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 whos...”

“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...”

“Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, m...”

“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.”

“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...”

“What is in the minds of the majority the society is unmindful of.”

“Power,' as the sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda writes, 'enters the picture in two ways': the first entails constructing and legitimizing the moral system itself; the second, in enforcing it. In this...”

“Everyone can be corrupted, even the great and the good.”