Jean Lorrain Quotes & Sayings

To dream! Such dreams certainly make life more worth living ... and only dreams can do that for me. — Jean Lorrain

One encounters in the streets, late at night on the evenings of fetes, the most strange and bizarre passers-by. Do these nights of popular celebration cause ancient and forgotten avatars to stir in the depths of the human soul? This evening, in the movement of the sweaty and excited crowd, I am certain that I passed between the masks of the liberated Bythinians and encountered the courtesans of the Roman decadence.
There emerged, this evening, from that swarming esplanade of Des Invalides - amid the crackle of fireworks, the shooting stars, the stink of frying, the hiccuping of drunkards and the reeking atmosphere of menageries - the wild effusions of one of Nero's festivals.
It was like the odour of a May evening on the Basso-Porto of Naples. It was easy to believe that the faces in that crowd were Sicilian. — Jean Lorrain

It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror. — Jean Lorrain

A strange girl, all phosphorous and cantharides, burning with every desire! And burning with every vice! — Jean Lorrain

You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I'm terrified by reality. — Jean Lorrain

I am an idea in an era that has no more of them. — Jean Lorrain

In France, it is only permissible to admire statues but tropical countries have no such prejudices, and the emergent Oriental in me took full account of the admirable proportions and the harmony of the movements of the acrobat on the stage. — Jean Lorrain

The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations. — Jean Lorrain

And it seemed that my flesh crawled with the gentleness of those glaucous things evoked by the verse. It was as if fingertips, like cut emeralds or fresh olives, were stroking the palm of my hand. — Jean Lorrain

And then I recalled those mysterious stories about the waxworkers of the middle ages and the public reprobation attached to their trade. Did they not live in cellars, in the eternal twilight propitious for enchantments and apparitions? Their visionary art (who, more than they, evoked a truer image of life?) was closely related to that of magicians: bewitchments were carried out with wax figures, witch trials are full of them, and one particular legend haunted me above all, that of the modeler from Anspach, who slowly squeezed the soul and the life out of his model in order to animate his painted waxwork and then, having finished his work of art, awaited nightfall to go and bury the corpse in the ditch at the city walls. — Jean Lorrain

The ring which you are holding, my friend, is identical to that one. I had it cut according to the model of the king's ring, and damascened in Spain. The original is still in the Escorial; it would have been pleasant to steal it, for I easily acquire the instincts of a thief when I am in a museum, and I always find objects which have a history - especially a tragic history - uniquely attractive. I am not an Englishman for nothing - but that which is easily enough accomplished in France is not at all practical in Spain: the museums there are very secure. — Jean Lorrain

The madness of the eyes is the lure of the abyss. Sirens lurk in the dark depths of the pupils as they lurk at the bottom of the sea, that I know for sure - but I have never encountered them, and I am searching still for the profound and plaintive gazes in whose depths I might be able, like Hamlet redeemed, to drown the Ophelia of my desire. — Jean Lorrain

(Priests) cheapjack merchants selling paradise — Jean Lorrain

Ensor sees with his imagination, but his vision is perfectly accurate, of an almost geometric precision. He is one of the very few who can really see. Like you, he has an obsession with masks; he is a seer as you and I are. The common herd, of course thinks that he is mad.
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You shall see what sort of man Ensor is, and what a marvellous insight he has into the invisible realm where our vices are created ... those vices for which our faces make masks. — Jean Lorrain

But that woman is an encyclopedia!
Of all vices, ancient and modern, and terribly interesting to leaf through!
— Jean Lorrain

The charm of horror only tempts the strong — Jean Lorrain

Freneuse is an oddball, an idler, without any aim in life! If you ask me, he has smoked too much opium in the East, and that explains his somnolence, his morbid lethargies. It's the hazardous legacy of bad habits! He has been comprehensively undone; the heavy influence of poisonous opiates never ceases to oppress him. Besides which, his steel-blue eyes are surely the eyes of a smoker of opium. He carries the drunken burden of hemp in his veins. Opium is like syphilis' - le Mazel released the word carelessly - 'it is a thing which stays for years and years in the blood, because the body is unable to purge itself. It must be absorbed, in the long run, by iodide. — Jean Lorrain

But this is till the same girl who once lived in the steppes, wild and indomitable. Even when she ceased to play in the falling snow, the snow continued to fall within her soul. She never sough lovers among the wealthy men and the crown princes who prostrated themselves before her; her heart, like her voice, remained faultless. The reputation, temperament and talent of the woman partook of exactly the same crystalline transparency and icy clarity. ("The Glass Of Blood") — Jean Lorrain

His fame as an artist requires very tender care. Look what a mask of diplomacy is painstakingly formed by the whole of that fine profile; he is as wily as a cardinal. He has scented in Miss White a useful agent of celebrity, and he has come solely to harness her to the cause of his glory. It is himself that he courts by means of the salaams he offers to her; he only ever flirts with himself. He is the Narcissus of the inkpot ... — Jean Lorrain

The larvae! The scent of young blood entices and draws them closer. There's no need to venture into antiquity to evoke the shades of the dead. — Jean Lorrain

Ingratitude' is the name which avatars of Narcissus give to the success of others. — Jean Lorrain

Her vice takes hold of her again, but she still refrains until some moment when, gnawed by some hideous caprice, she comes aground like a mournful wreck ruined by lust, in the midst of her own banal, perfidious pollution. — Jean Lorrain

The beauty of the twentieth century is the charm of the hospital, the grace of the cemetery, of consumption and emaciation. I admit that I have submitted to it all; worse, I have loved with all my heart. — Jean Lorrain