"There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism."
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)

"The fish dies because he opens his mouth."
— Spanish Proverb

"Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black. She has a knife, knife, knife, stuck in her back, back, back. She cannot breathe, breathe, breathe. She cannot cry, cry, cry. Thats why she begs, begs, begs. She begs to die, die ,die.."
— Laurie Faria Stolarz (White Is for Magic)

"...and there you have it, another body on the floor surrounded by things that don't mean much to anyone except to the one who can't take any of them along. "
— Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)

"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 – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure."
— Asti Hustvedt (The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France)

"Other people are likely not to be aware that those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead. Now if this is true, it would be absurd to be eager for nothing but this all their lives, and then to be troubled when that came for which they had all along been eagerly practicing."
— Plato (Phaedo)