“Evening fell. At sunset the mountains were opalescent. New ones appeared; they trailed laminated algae, which, long and fine as hair, appeared first as captive sirens, then as a vast reticulation; the moon shone through as a jellyfish in a net, as nacreous holothurian; then moving freely through the open sky, the moon turned azure-colored. Pensive stars went astray, whirled, plunged into the sea. Toward midnight appeared a gigantic vessel; the moon illuminated it mysteriously; its rigging stood motionless; the bridge was dark. It passed close beside us; there was no sound of oars, no noise from the crew. We finally realized that it was caught in the ice, between two icebergs that had closed in on it. It passed on by, silently, and disappeared.”

André Gide, 1893

“They are creatures perfect enough to disquiet their creators with the possibility that these strange beings should one day cross, by means of their acquired speed, the narrow frontier within which intelligence confines instinct, trying in their turn to scale the heavens, to stifle their bewildered masters against breasts of bronze, and to render into their native dust the human clay that they once took for gods!”

Alfred Didier Marie Mesnard, comte de Chousy, 1884

“The Eye, Like A Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity.” 

Odilon Redon, 1882

 

“Harmony is nothing but a garment, more or less diaphanous, more or less suitable, which one throws over a beautiful body like gauze, silk, linen or wool, allowing one to discern its forms and outlines, disguising them, or altogether suppressing them. Melody without harmony is always something; harmony without melody is nothing.”

Fabre d'Olivet, 1810

“Already the Master’s soul has departed, at the mere word The Bells, toward dazzling rhapsodies.

“Here ring out upon the piano: bells of spring mornings, bells across the countryside, bells of village baptisms.

“And the harmonies are as limpid as the sky where the last rose-colored traces of dawn have just faded.

“Then comes the Angelus bell, hovering like a sacred dove above fields where sheaves lie flattened, cut by the sickle, now idle in the brown hands of praying peasant women.

“The keyboard murmurs like distant organs in Gregorian plainsong.

“But here is the tocsin—the bell of disaster, of insurrection, of massacre.

“And the chords, under the magician’s fingers, become dissonant, torn by cries, heated with cascading blood, darkly blazing with fire.

“One can discern the clash of arms; the chromatic scale of turmoil rides the sound waves; the minor lament of the sacrificed breathes out.

“Bah! Since men kill one another, they must be remade.”

Maria Anastasia Krysińska, 1905

“That garden is singular too; you shall see it shortly, very nearly as it has always been. High walls surround it on three sides and weld it to the house. It is not vast; it is square; arcades of old box-trees line the wall and form two niches at the far corners in which there are two figures, one of a Faun crushing a bunch of grapes under his hoof, the other of a Centaur rolling a waterskin with his. In the center there is a pond, also square, with raised edges of green-tinted stone, in the middle of which, on a pedestal set in the water, stands a green bronze statue of a naked man who seems to be listening attentively to the surroundings. As there are neither trees nor flowers in the garden, dead leaves and petals do not fall into the water; it shines, bright, profound and black; when one walks around it one can see therein the mirage of the statue, which follows you, and always seems to be looking at you, for it has four identical faces on four bodies, which, by an artifice of optics, are the same one, taking turns.”

Henri de Regnier, 1897

“And Monelle handed me a hollow stalk of fennel, inside of which burned a pink filament. 

“'Take this torch,' she said, 'and burn. Burn everything on the earth and in the sky. And break the fennel and put out its flame when you have finished burning, for nothing should be passed on; 

“'So that you be the second Narthekophoros, and that you destroy with fire, and that the fire fallen from the sky rise again to its heights.'”

Marcel Schwob, 1894

 

“'What! You are singing in a theatre!' exclaimed my aunt, when I told her of my engagement at Brussels. 'My poor child! You will be everlastingly damned! Who would ever have thought such a thing possible? A little girl of our family going to be an actress—one of those women who could not be buried in consecrated ground in the old days! The curé himself has told me all about it. It's terrible, terrible!' she cried, rocking herself back and forth in her chair and bursting into tears. 'I will pray for you!'”

Emma Calve, 1922

“We read also, that they in Apulia that were touched with a kinde of dangerous Spider, were astonished untill they heard a certain sound, at the hearing of which every one riseth up and danceth.”

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, 1533

“Have the beautiful magic lantern set up in your home. It won't cost you more than fifty-five sous. Until now it has only been the pleasure of children, but I have invented a magic lantern for the usage of adults, which will show you a thousand ingenious and various tableaux for the amusement of parents and the tranquility of children.

“Attach a white sheet to your wall, while calling to me through the window, and arrange yourselves very sagely, like the Tuesday spectators at the Comédie Française. I shall come with my apparatus, and then you will have pleasure for your money. You will see the Good God, and Monsieur le Soleil, Madame la Lune, Mesdemoiselles les Étoiles, the King, the Queen, the Gendarme, the Executioner, Morning, Midday, Evening, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Elements and many figures of an enticing modernity.”

Théodore de Banville, 1883

 

“After a comfortable dinner, as we were lighting cigars, plunged in profound armchairs, someone pronounced the word occultism, and our conversation turned toward strange things.”

Gabriel de Lautrec, 1922

“I don’t imagine I shall ever be 'influential.' I've been too thorough in cultivating my indifference to my fellow human beings, which is probably the only way one can choose between them.”

Claude Debussy, 1901

“My first sensations under the new drug were similar to those induced by a strong dose of Cannabis indica. There was the same protraction of the time-sense, by which mere minutes were stretched out into ages; and the same spatial expansion, by which my laboratory walls appeared to recede to an immense distance, and my own body, as well as the familiar objects about me, extended themselves to prodigious height and length. The legs of my chair were tall as the famed sequoias. My hand and arm, reaching up to make sure that the graph was correctly adjusted on my forehead over the pineal gland, seemed to scale a gulf like that of some profound canyon. A carboy loomed like a giant monument.

“I gazed on a medley of strange-angled forms that might have materialized from a geometrician's nightmare.”

Clark Ashton Smith, 1933

 

“Hashish is composed of a extraction of Indian hemp, butter, and a small quantity of opium. Take a clump the size of a nut, fill a small spoon, and happiness will be yours: absolute happiness with all its intoxication, its youthful folly, and its infinite blessedness. 

“As far as possible, you need a fine apartment or a beautiful scene, a free and unconcerned mind, and a few accomplices whose intellectual talents are similar to your own; and a little music if you can get it.

“Then the hallucinations begin. External objects take on a monstrous appearance. They show your senses forms heretofore unknown. Then they are deformed and finally enter into your being, or rather you enter into theirs. Sounds have colors, and colors have a music. Musical notes are numbers, and you perform mathematical calculations with terrifying speed as the music flows into your ears. You are seated and you have a smoke; you start to think that now you're inside the pipe, and it's you whom your pipe is smoking; you yourself are being exhaled in the form of bluish clouds.”

Charles Baudelaire, 1860

“For today, be content to know that this crocodile is a cruel being, but cunning, as the wicked are, and timid, like them.

“In fact, by dint of agitating, the crocodile is oozing a thick foam from all its pores, which emits a noxious odor. In addition, torrents of fire emerge from its mouth, which would have intimidated the most intrepid of men. That foam and that fire amalgamate together and are transformed into an innumerable multitude of maleficent animals of every species, which circulate en masse in the atmosphere, obscuring it to such an extent that nothing at all can any longer be discerned, and not the slightest particle remains that is breathable.”

Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, 1798

 

“I had taken hashish three times with little result, beyond a slight disturbance of the optical perceptions. The fourth time, I increased the dose by a fourth of the usual amount, and waited patiently among my books.

“I gazed upon them with the dreamy languor of a god.”

Clark Ashton Smith, 1920

“Thanks to the labors of a science which is comparatively recent, and more especially to the researches of the students of Hindu and Egyptian antiquities, it is very much easier today than it was not so long ago to discover the source, to unravel the underground network of that great mysterious river which since the beginning of history has been flowing beneath all religions, all faiths, and all philosophies: in a word, beneath all the visible and every-day manifestations of human thought.”

Maurice Maeterlinck, 1922

 

“On the eleventh day, in the morning, Ab-Hakek was not yet dead. A noise of heavy footsteps was heard in the stairwell of the turret. The door opened: a phantasmagoric and portentous being entered. It was Agraman. 

“At the sight of him, the magician, burdened and statue-like as he was, stood up. ‘I am hungry!’ he murmured, ‘I am going to die: it is time to tell me the last word of science.’

“Agraman took him by the wrist and shouted in his ear, with a violent and metallic burst of laughter: ‘Master! Science is the shadow of a shadow: umbra umbræ!’”

Alphonse Esquiros, 1838

 

“This opera by Zola and Bruneau is full of symbols. I must say I don’t understand this excessive need for symbols. They seem to have forgotten that it is still music that is supreme in its beauty. As you would expect, each symbol takes the form of a leitmotiv; once again music is weighed down by these obstinate little phrases, which insist on having their say no matter what else is going on. Really, to pretend that such-and-such a succession of chords represents this or that sentiment, and that so-and-so phrase is one or another character—it is nothing but an anthropometrical game.”

Claude Debussy, 1901

“Baudelaire really gets on my nerves.”

Eugène Delacroix, 1857