Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.

- Joris-Karl Huysmans

Speaking of dust, ‘out of which we came and to which we shall return,’ do you know that after we are dead our corpses are devoured by different kinds…

- 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

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

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

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

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

- Joris-Karl Huysmans

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

- Joris-Karl Huysmans

Only the chaste are truly obscene.

- Joris-Karl Huysmans