Baudelaire Quotes - Page 2

• If you are interested in happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters.

  Daniel Handler

  Book, Reading, Would Be

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• In the time since the Baudelaire parents' death, most of the Baudelaire orphans' friends had fallen by the wayside, an expression wich here means "they stopped calling, writing, and stopping by to see any of the Baudelaires, making them lonely". You and I, of course, would never do this to any of our grieving acquaintances, but it is a sad truth that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.

  Daniel Handler

  Lonely, Writing, Mean

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• Of course I'm trying to trick you! That's the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everyone runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else.

  Daniel Handler

  Running, Secret, Trying

  "The End". Book by Daniel Handler, 2006.

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• I am certain that over the course of your own life, you have noticed that people's rooms reflect their personalities. In my room, for instance, I have gathered a collection of objects that are important to me, including a dusty accordion on which I can play a few sad songs, a large bundle of notes on the activities of the Baudelaire orphans, and a blurry photograph, taken a very long time ago, of a woman whose name is Beatrice. These are items that are very precious and dear to me.

  Daniel Handler

  Song, Taken, Play

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• An old woman I loved very much when I was young - the wife of Jean Villard - she's just reciting poetry all the time, which is beautiful because it means she went back to the world of poetry that she loved when she was young. That's all she does - she almost doesn't recognize her children, but she recites Valéry and Baudelaire. So what? We're the ones who are suffering. She's not.

  Agnes Varda

  Beautiful, Children, Mean

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. October 1, 2009.

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• In a way Poe was a big influence for Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes. I think he really did influence many artist of the time like Baudelaire, who was a big fan of Poe, and who was the one that brought attention to Poe's work in Europe.

  Raul Garcia

  Artist, Thinking, Europe

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• As Baudelaire said it so beautifully, Emma Bovary is an androgynous character. She cannot be reduced to a gender or a sociological type. She represents something bigger than herself. That was the genius of Flaubert: the ability to combine the general and the particular.

  Sophie Barthes

  Character, Genius, Emma

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• At university, I had been obsessed with reading about the lives of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and I was steeped in the crazy poets, and I came to view my early subjects through that prism.

  Iggy Pop

  Crazy, Reading, Views

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• Barrie and the wonderful characters he created, Lewis Carroll, even French literature, like Baudelaire or over in the States, Poe, you open those books, you open The Flowers of Evil and begin to read. If it were written today, you'd be absolutely stupefied by the work. It's this incredible period where the work is timeless, ageless. So yeah, I just love all those guys. It's my deep passion in those great 19th century writers.

  Johnny Depp

  Flower, Book, Character

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• Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem, it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry.

  Stephen Dobyns

  Writing, Long, Poetry

  Stephen Dobyns (2011). “Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry”, p.198, Macmillan

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• We have plenty to learn from the numerous ants. Sawako Nakayasu-writer, antologist, Baudelaire's sister-turns daily life inside out and upside down then puts it into perfect little boxes. Here we follow the lines of black legged, syntactical units-the words-as they cross and they tickle the heart of the matter with us.

  John Granger

  Heart, Perfect, Black

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• Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.

  Camille Paglia

  Writing, Ideas, Hands

  "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson". Book by Camille Paglia, 1990.

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• The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Plato, Mass Culture, People

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.67, Routledge

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• The true clerc is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never diverted from single-hearted adoration of the beautiful and the divine by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such clercs are inevitably rare. The rule is that the living creature condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and thence to the sanctifying of those passions.

  Julien Benda

  Beautiful, Struggle, Passion

  "Treason of the Intellectuals". Book by Julien Benda, p. 159, 1927.

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• Artists are people who are subject to irrational convictions of the sacred. Baudelaire said that an artist is a child who has acquired adult capacities and discipline. Art education should help build those capacities and that discipline without messing over the child.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Art, Children, Discipline

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• I think it's basically quite different from dreams. If only cinema was that easy. Because dreams, all you have to do is fall asleep, and you can have fantastic vision. I know Baudelaire and people like that enhance their dreams with opium or something. But films are very constructed - they're like architecture. They're pieced together, glued together. To me, it's a craft. It's like making a tapestry.

  Kenneth Anger

  Dream, Fall, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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