La Fanfarlo Quotes

“How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
― Charles Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo

“The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight.”
― Charles Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo

“He sadly resumes his path toward a desert that he knows is similar to the one he just crossed, escorted by the pale phantom they call Reason, who lights up the aridity of his path with a weak lantern, and who, when the thirst of passion comes back from time to time, quenches it with the poison of ennui.”
― Charles Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo

“He is at once a great lazybones, pitifully ambitious, and famous for unhappiness; for his entire life he has had practically nothing but half-baked ideas. The sun of laziness, which ceaselessly glows within him, vaporizes him and gnaws away that half-genius that heaven bestowed upon him.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Fanfarlo

“Samuel was, more than all the others, the man of failed works of beauty; – a fantastical and sickly creature, whose poetry shines forth much more in his person than in his works, and who, around one o’clock in the morning, between the dazzling of a coal fire and the clock’s tick-tock, always seemed to be the god of impotence, – a modern and hermaphrodite god, – so colossal an impotence, so enormous, reaching epic proportions!”
― Charles Baudelaire, Fanfarlo

“How often, in the leisure of imagination, have I seen again one of those beautiful autumnal evenings when young souls make as much progress as those trees which grow several feet after being struck by lightning! Then I see, I feel, I understand; the moon awakens the plump moths; the warm breeze opens the evening flowers; the water in the great fountains sleeps.—Imagine you hear the sudden waltzes played on that mysterious piano. The perfumes of the storm come in through the windows; it is the hour when the gardens are full of pink and white dresses which are not afraid of getting damp. The accommodating bushes catch flying skirts; brown hair and blond curls whirl around together!”
― Charles Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo

“We have set our hearts so completely on becoming worldly-wise, we have overstrained our microscopes to such an extent for the purpose of examining the ghastly protuberances and shameful blemishes with which we are covered and which we joyfully cultivate, that it is not possible for us to speak the language of common men. They live to live and we, alas, we live to understand.”
― Charles Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo