Baudelaire Quotes

The beautiful is always bizarre.

Charles Baudelaire

Beautiful, Art, Creativity

Charles Baudelaire (2015). “Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal”, p.194, Arc Publications

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To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Charles Baudelaire

Practice, Sorcery, Language

"L'art Romantique". Book by Charles Baudelaire, 1869.

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Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

Charles Baudelaire

Men, Like Family, Spite

David Paul, Charles Baudelaire (1996). “Poison and vision: poems and prose of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud”, Univ of Salzberg Pr

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Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

Stephen Fry

Believe, Names, Intellectual

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The story of the Baudelaires takes place in a very real world, where some people are laughed at just because they have something wrong with them, and where children can find themselves all alone in the world, struggling to understand the mystery that surrounds them.

Daniel Handler

Children, Real, Struggle

"The Carnivorous Carnival". Book by Daniel Handler, 2002.

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When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

J. G. Ballard

Honesty, Movement, Painting

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Waiting is one of life's hardships. It is hard enough to wait for chocolate cream pie while burnt roast beef is still on your plate. It is plenty difficult to wait for Halloween when the tedious month of September is still ahead of you. But to wait for one's adopted uncle to come home while a greedy and violent man is upstairs was one of the worst waits the Baudelaires had ever experienced.

Daniel Handler

Uncles, Halloween, Home

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Klaus sighed, and opened a book, and as at so many other times when the middle Baudelaire child did not want to think about his circumstances, he began to read.

Daniel Handler

Children, Book, Thinking

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But the more I read... after awhile... I begin to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene... Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf... the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot... the same dull old scene...

Ken Kesey

Writing, Cat, Gone

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We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

Lionel Trilling

Thinking, Wrath, Hands

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Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.

Charles Baudelaire

Dream, Mean, Men

"Degas, Manet, Morisot". Book by Paul Valéry, 1989.

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Robert Scott Leyse channels Baudelaire's Queen of Spades and Jack of Hearts, speaking darkly of dead loves, in this new book. He also reminds me of James Purdy's notorious eccentricity. There's plenty of middlebrow stuff if you want it. Self-Murder isn't that.

Kris Saknussemm

Queens, Book, Heart

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Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.

Jonathan Franzen

Artist, Hip Hop, Today

Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.66, Macmillan

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And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous,
He must die a little death each morning,
He must swallow his toad and study his vomit
as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.

Delmore Schwartz

Morning, Poetry, Toads

Delmore Schwartz (1989). “Last & Lost Poems”, p.53, New Directions Publishing

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Johnny Depp is like a brother to me. We have matching tattoos on our backs - Charles Baudelaire, the flowers of evil, this giant skeleton thing. It's kind of a secret. People say to us, 'Why did you get that?' And we say, 'No reason.'

Marilyn Manson

Tattoo, Brother, Flower

"This much I know: Marilyn Manson". Interview with Megan Conner, www.theguardian.com. July 14, 2012.

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The thing about Paris, it's a great city for wandering around and buying shoes and nursing a cafe au lait for hours on end and pretending you're Baudelaire. But it's not a city where you can work.

Malcolm Mclaren

Nursing, Shoes, Paris

"This much I know" by Malcolm McLaren, www.theguardian.com. November 15, 2008.

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Get out of my way, you cakesniffers!” said a rude, violent, and filthy little girl, shoving the Baudelaire orphans aside as she dashed by.

Daniel Handler

Girl, Rude, Littles

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And a refrigerator may hold a basket of strawberries, which would be important if a maniac said to you, "If you don't give me a basket of strawberries right now, I'm going to poke you with this large stick." But when the two elder Baudelaires and Quigley Quagmire opened the refrigerator, they found nothing that would help someone who was wounded, dying of thirst, or being threatened by a strawberry-crazed, stick-carrying maniac.

Daniel Handler

Two, Giving, Important

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E!" Klaus cried. "E as in Exit!" The Baudelaires ran down E as in Exit, but when they reached the last cabinet, the row was becoming F as in Falling File Cabinets, G as in Go the Other Way! and H as in How in the World Are We Going to Escape?

Daniel Handler

Fall, World, Way

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Life isn't fair," he said, in his undisguised voice, and for once the Baudelaire orphans agreed with every word the man said.

Daniel Handler

Men, Voice, Orphan

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(Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.

Joris-Karl Huysmans

Yellow, Sick, House

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This story is about the Baudelaires. And they are the sort of people who know that there’s always something. Something to invent, something to read, something to bite, and something to do, to make a sanctuary, no matter how small. And for this reason, I am happy to say, the Baudelaires were very fortunate indeed.

Daniel Handler

People, Stories, Sanctuary

"A Series of Unfortunate Events". www.imdb.com. 2004.

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He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted to make this experience a masterpiece of experience which absolutely transcended the everyday. And this would annihilate the effects of the cruel drug, boredom, to which he was addicted although, perhaps, the element of boredom which is implicit in an affair so isolated from the real world was its principle appeal for him.

Angela Carter

Art, Real, Order

Angela Carter (1997). “Burning your boats: the collected short stories”, Penguin Group USA

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Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.

Gaston Bachelard

Eye, Writing, Depth

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...then he looked at my T-shirt and saw Byron's picture on it and he quoted "She Walks in Beauty," which is like my favorite poem next to the one by Baudelaire about his girlfriend being nothing but worm food, except that Lily called that one first because Baudelaire is her fave poet and so she got the shirt with him on it, even though Byron is way more scrumptious and I would do him on sharp gravel if I had the chance. --from The Chronicles of Abby Normal

Christopher Moore

Girlfriend, Lilies, Abby

Christopher Moore (2009). “You Suck”, p.66, Hachette UK

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