To be kissed on the lips by your husband is the most…

“Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the…

— Asti Hustvedt

“Stay where I can taste you. Take the pleasure I give you.”

— Shayla Black

“The Marquis de V... - whose falsetto voice and little watery eyes I have always detested - was saying to me with a wicked…

— Jean Lorrain

I don't see decadence really as what you do, because I don't do much at all that is decadent in my life. But I…

— Marianne Faithfull

“There were charming ones as well as terrible ones, that I must admit. The painter was particularly entranced by Japanese masks: warriors', actors' and…

— Jean Lorrain

“This,' said the stranger softly, as if to himself, 'is the woeful proof, indeed, of decadence. Man waives his prerogative of lordship over the…

— Bernard Capes

“Rose was patently a degenerate. Nature, in scheduling his characteristics, had pruned all superlatives. The rude armour of the flesh, under which the spiritual,…

— Bernard Capes

“I think God hands over to His apprentices the moulding of vessels that don't interest Him. ("The Accursed Cordonnier")”

— Bernard Capes

“The beauty of the twentieth century is the charm of the hospital, the grace of the cemetery, of consumption and emaciation. I admit that…

— Jean Lorrain

I haven't got purity, and I don't think I ever did. I have always been, even as a child, a very decadent little person.

— Marianne Faithfull

I was raised in a solidly upper-middle class family who had really strong values and excess was not one of the things that my…

— Anne Hathaway

“He saw a chamber, broad and low, designed, in its every rich stain of picture and slumberous hanging, to appeal to the sensuous. And…

— Bernard Capes

“After two years' absence she finally returned to chilly Europe, a trifle weary, a trifle sad, disgusted by our banal entertainments, our shrunken landscapes,…

— Octave Mirbeau

“(Decadent style) is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language... forcing itself to express…

— Theophile Gautier

We use fashion for status and to beautify and there's nothing wrong with that, but when it becomes completely unbalanced, then you're living a…

— David LaChapelle