8 quotes
The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
Death in Venice (1912)
I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
Death in Venice (1912)
But he would “stay the course” — it was his favorite motto.
Death in Venice (1912)
Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.
Death in Venice (1912)
How else is the famous short story ‘A study in Abjection’ to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently undermined by psychology.
Death in Venice (1912)
This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty — this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.
Death in Venice (1912)
How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin — a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!
Death in Venice (1912)
Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.
Death in Venice (1912)