Là-Bas Quotes

“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, Là-Bas

“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 of worms according as we are fat or thin? In fat corpses one species of maggot is found, the rhizophagus, while thin corpses are patronized only by the phora. The latter is evidently the aristocrat, the fastidious gourmet which turns up its nose at a heavy meal of copious breasts and juicy at bellies. Just think, there is no perfect equality, even in the manner in which we feed the worms.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“I marvel at the placidity of the Utopian who imagines that man is perfectible. There is no denying that the human creature is born selfish, abusive, vile. Just look around you and see. Society cynical and ferocious, the humble heckled and pillaged by the rich traffickers in necessities. Everywhere the triumph of the mediocre and unscrupulous, everywhere the apotheosis of crooked politics and finance. And you think you can make any progress against a stream like that? No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less rotten at present. Only the form of his sins varies. Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.”
― Huysmans Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.”
― Huysmans Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Daydream is the only good thing in life. Everything else is vulgar and empty.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“This landscape of abomination is in a state of flux. Gilles now sees that the trunks are covered in frightful tumours and goitres. He observes exostosis and ulcers, pustulent sores the size of rocks, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries. It is a vegetal leper house, an aboreal venereal clinic in which, at a turn in the path, there stands a copper beech.

And as he stands beneath those crimson leaves, he feels that he is being drenched in a shower of blood; and imagining that a wood nymph lives under the bark, he becomes enraged; he wants to fumble in the flesh of a goddess, massacre the Dryad, violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Curious, a man's affection for the object that he manipulates.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“He did not believe, and yet he admitted the supernatural. Right here on earth how could any of us deny that we are hemmed in by mystery, in our homes, in the street,—everywhere when we came to think of it?”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-bas

“The heart, said to be man’s noblest organ, has the same shape as the penis, commonly supposed the most ignoble; the symbolism is not inappropriate, because the love which comes from the heart soon extends to the organ which it resembles.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Remorse is perhaps the condiment which keeps passion from being too unappetizing to the blasé.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Любить друг друга издали, безнадёжно, безответно, не рассчитывая на взаимность, никогда не принадлежать друг другу, целомудренно мечтать о недоступных прелестях, о невозможных поцелуях, о ласках, угасших на изгладившемся из памяти мёртвом челе, - ах. какое это, должно быть, чудное, ничем не омрачённое счастье! Всё остальное мерзость и тлен.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“It's foolish to let my thoughts wander this way," he said, drawing himself up, "but daydream is the only good thing in life. Everything else is vulgar and empty.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Похоже, у литературы есть лишь одно оправдание - она спасает того, кто ею занимается, от отвращения к жизни.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“She interrupted him. "My husband has no concern with the relations which may exist between you and me. He evidently suffers when I go out, as tonight, for he knows where I am going; but I admit no right of control either on his part or mine. He is free, and I am free, to go wherever we please. I must keep house for him, watch out for his interests, take care of him, love him like a devoted companion, and that I do, with all my heart. As to being responsible for my acts, they're none of his business, no more his than anybody else's."

She spoke in a crisp, incisive tone.

"The devil;" said Durtal. "You certainly reduce the importance of the rôle of husband."

"I know that my ideas are not the ideas of the world I live in...”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“But," thought Durtal, "seeing that there are so many more things betwixt heaven and earth than are dreamed of in anybody's philosophy, why not believe in the Trinity? Why reject the divinity of Christ? It is no strain on one to admit the Credo quia absurdum of Saint Augustine and Tertullian and say that if the supernatural were comprehensible it would not be supernatural, and that precisely because it passes the faculties of man it is divine. "And—oh,”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-bas

“Ah, when one has not the gift of rendering one's grief superbly and transforming it into literary or musical passages which weep magnificently, the best thing is to keep still about it.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Persons of good sense are necessarily dull, because they revolve over and over again the tedious topics of everyday life.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“When, one day, Durtal reproached him for concealing his productions, he replied with a certain melancholy, "No, I caught myself in time to choke down a base instinct, the desire of resaying what has been said. I could have plagiarized Flaubert as well as, if not better than, the poll parrots who are doing it, but I decided not to. I would rather phrase abstruse medicaments of rare application; perhaps it is not very necessary, but at least it isn't cheap.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“No, man has never changed. His soul was corrupt in the days of Genesis and is not less rotten at present. Only the form of his sins varies. Progress is the hypocrisy which refines the vices.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“No, she wanted me to beg her to do what she wanted to do. Like all women, she wanted me to offer her what she desired. I have been rolled.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Progress is the hypocrisy in which vice is refined!”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“But if in Love and Well-doing the infinite is approachable for certain souls, the out-of-the-world possibilities of Evil are limited.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“One can take pride in going as far in crime as a saint in virtue.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“He can verify that axiom of demonographers, that the Evil One dupes all persons who give themselves, or are willing to give themselves, to him.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Let's not malign the restaurants," said Des Hermies. "They afford a very special delight to the person who has the instinct of the inspector. I had an opportunity to gratify this instinct just the other night. I was returning from a call on a patient, and I dropped into one of these establishments where for the sum of three francs you are entitled to soup, two selected dishes, a salad, and a dessert.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Ah, this coarse, tear-compelling Calvary was at the opposite pole from those debonair Golgothas adopted by the Church ever since the Renaissance. This lockjaw Christ was not the Christ of the rich, the Adonis of Galilee, the exquisite dandy, the handsome youth with the curly brown tresses, divided beard, and insipid doll-like features, whom the faithful have adored for four centuries. This was the Christ of Justin, Basil, Cyril, Tertullian, the Christ of the apostolic church, the vulgar Christ, ugly with the assumption of the whole burden of our sins and clothed, through humility, in the most abject of forms.

It was the Christ of the poor, the Christ incarnate in the image of the most miserable of us He came to save; the Christ of the afflicted, of the beggar, of all those on whose indigence and helplessness the greed of their brother battens; the human Christ, frail of flesh, abandoned by the Father until such time as no further torture was possible; the Christ with no recourse but His Mother, to Whom—then powerless to aid Him—He had, like every man in torment, cried out with an infant's cry.

In an unsparing humility, doubtless, He had willed to suffer the Passion with all the suffering permitted to the human senses, and, obeying an incomprehensible ordination, He, in the time of the scourging and of the blows and of the insults spat in His face, had put off divinity, nor had He resumed it when, after these preliminary mockeries, He entered upon the unspeakable torment of the unceasing agony. Thus, dying like a thief, like a dog, basely, vilely, physically, He had sunk himself to the deepest depth of fallen humanity and had not spared Himself the last ignominy of putrefaction.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Living in an aërial tomb outside the human scramble, he was faithful to his art, and in consequence no longer had any reason for existing. He vegetated, superfluous and demoded, in a society which insisted that for its amusement the holy place be turned into a concert hall. He was like a creature reverted, a relic of a bygone age.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“His behaviour was like that of the conscious or unconscious demonomaniacs who do evil for evil's sake. They are no more mad than the rapt monk in his cell, than the man who does good for good's sake. Anybody but a medical theorist can see that the desire for good and the desire for evil simply form the two opposing poles of the soul.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas