He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him

- Joris-Karl Huysmans

In this game he had acquired a great deal of muddled knowledge, more than one approximation and less than one certitude. And absence of energy, a cur…

- Joris-Karl Huysmans

Only the chaste are truly obscene.

- Joris-Karl Huysmans

...he shrunk more and more from the realities of life and above all from the society of his day which he regarded with an ever growing horror,--a det…

- Joris-Karl Huysmans

No longer was she merely the dancing-girl who extorts a cry of lust and concupiscence from an old man by the lascivious contortions of her body; who …

- Joris-Karl Huysmans

Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, un…

- Joris-Karl Huysmans

At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterou…

- Joris-Karl Huysmans

There's no doubt about it - gardeners are the only true artists these days.

- Joris-Karl Huysmans

Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stup…

- Joris-Karl Huysmans