Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories Quotes

“Bruges had the air of a ghost town. The high towers, the trees along the canals withdrew, absorbed by the same muslin: impenetrable fog with not a single rift. Even the carillon seemed to have to escape, to force its way out of a prison yard filled with cotton wool to be free in the air, to reach the gables over which, every quarter of an hour, the bells poured, like falling leaves, a melancholy autumn of music.”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“Oh, the joy of the arrival of a child, which is both the one and the other, a mirror in which husband and wife, who love each other, can see each other in one single face.”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“The man did not attempt to deny it: 'Yes! It's the fault of
this town.'

The woman, pale and mournful, agreed: 'It's not our fault.
Death is stronger than Love here.' ("The Dead Town")”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“All lovers desire solitude in order to possess each other more completely. They create for each other a new universe inhabited by the two of them alone. ("The Dead Town")”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“Oh, the sudden change of perspective brought about by travel and absence! How different everything was here: the people in the streets, the houses, the color of the air, the sky above the roofs, a low sky, very close, with molded clouds, and which looked as if it had come out of a painting. A unique setting, a subtle atmosphere of silvery greys, the patina of centuries on the old walls—a shimmering marvel for the eyes of a painter. ("The Dead Town")”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“Then he returned to his theme: 'If so many lovers feel the desire to die and more and more die each day, while still in love, it is because love and death are linked by analogies, by underground passages, and communicate. One leads to the other. The one makes the other more acute, more intense. There is no doubt that death is a great stimulant of love. ("Love And Death")”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“Even during the nights, their nights punctuated by unending kisses, they were sometimes irritated by the carillon, which sounded every quarter of an hour from the top of the belfry opposite. A slow, indistinct jingling which seemed to come from far, far away, from the depths of childhood, from the depths of the ages. It was like a dead bouquet falling, an autumn of sound shedding its leaves over the town. ("The Dead Town")”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“Wilhelmine chatted on, chatted as if emboldened by the gathering dusk. She wasn't afraid any more. She didn't blush any more. And in this chatter without lamplight the dark seemed to suffuse her words as well. Her voice deepened. Darkness can have a strange influence. It has something religious about it and makes one speak in a low voice, as if in a church.”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“He mostly preached in the evening, when the college
church was already shrouded in shadow. And he chose subjects that filled the imagination with salutary fear—sin, Hell, death—painting pictures that were sometimes cajoling, more often harrowing, evoking the effects of the fire on the damned. The little group of pupils listened, apprehensive, sometimes terrified, a distraught flock whose black shepherd is gesticulating towards distant flames.”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“Is not piety itself passion, but passion ennobled, sanctified? The whole of the Catholic liturgy, with its scenery and props, of which every one is an inspired invention, is enough to satisfy those suffering the obscure torments of a conflict between the ideal and sensuality.”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“Mevr. Cadzand feared for her son who, with his responsive nature, as sensitive as a hothouse plant, was more exposed. Fortunately religion is a means of protection, of diverting energies into other channels. Hans's mother was glad that they had cultivated his piety at the college and that she herself, with altars in the month of Mary, novenas, candles lit, rosaries recited and pilgrimages made, had further developed this faith, which keeps men safe through the fear of Hell.”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“Yes, it was the love of woman that was the danger, the obstacle on which her dearest wish might founder. How it grieves mothers to tell themselves that, at the very moment it has occurred to them, there already exists a woman who is making her way towards their son from the depths of eternity.”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“But any great happiness is a bright light, a challenge to fate to do its worst. There must not be people who are too happy. They would discourage all the rest, to whom life grants nothing more than unexceptional moments, intermittent joys, roses that have to be watered with tears.”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“It was during this final Parisian period of Rodenbach's life that his literary absorption in Bruges really rose and flowered. Bruges-La-Morte was the Paris literary sensation of 1892, and he followed it with La Vocation in 1895, and Le Carilloneur (translated as The Bells of Bruges) in 1897. This kind of immersion at a distance is hardly unknown - think of Joyce, minutely anatomizing Dublin in Ulysses while living in Trieste - but it is also quintessentially Symbolist in its concern with the richness and plenitude of absence: 'The essence of art that is in any way noble is the DREAM,' wrote Rodenbach, 'and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished, unattainable.' (Introduction)”
― Phil Baker, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories

“(We) fell out of love with life for having learnt too much of death. ("At School")”
― Georges Rodenbach, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories