Baudelaire Quotes

• The beautiful is always bizarre.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Beautiful, Art, Creativity

  Charles Baudelaire (2015). “Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal”, p.194, Arc Publications

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• To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Practice, Sorcery, Language

  "L'art Romantique". Book by Charles Baudelaire, 1869.

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• Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Men, Like Family, Spite

  David Paul, Charles Baudelaire (1996). “Poison and vision: poems and prose of Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud”, Univ of Salzberg Pr

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• Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.

  Stephen Fry

  Believe, Names, Intellectual

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• The story of the Baudelaires takes place in a very real world, where some people are laughed at just because they have something wrong with them, and where children can find themselves all alone in the world, struggling to understand the mystery that surrounds them.

  Daniel Handler

  Children, Real, Struggle

  "The Carnivorous Carnival". Book by Daniel Handler, 2002.

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• (Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.

  Joris-Karl Huysmans

  Yellow, Sick, House

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• And hence the poet must seek to be essentially anonymous,
  He must die a little death each morning,
  He must swallow his toad and study his vomit
  as Baudelaire studied la charogne of Jeanne Duval.

  Delmore Schwartz

  Morning, Poetry, Toads

  Delmore Schwartz (1989). “Last & Lost Poems”, p.53, New Directions Publishing

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• Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Artist, Hip Hop, Today

  Jonathan Franzen (2007). “How to Be Alone: Essays”, p.66, Macmillan

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• Robert Scott Leyse channels Baudelaire's Queen of Spades and Jack of Hearts, speaking darkly of dead loves, in this new book. He also reminds me of James Purdy's notorious eccentricity. There's plenty of middlebrow stuff if you want it. Self-Murder isn't that.

  Kris Saknussemm

  Queens, Book, Heart

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• We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.

  Lionel Trilling

  Thinking, Wrath, Hands

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• But the more I read... after awhile... I begin to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene... Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf... the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot... the same dull old scene...

  Ken Kesey

  Writing, Cat, Gone

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• Klaus sighed, and opened a book, and as at so many other times when the middle Baudelaire child did not want to think about his circumstances, he began to read.

  Daniel Handler

  Children, Book, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• Waiting is one of life's hardships. It is hard enough to wait for chocolate cream pie while burnt roast beef is still on your plate. It is plenty difficult to wait for Halloween when the tedious month of September is still ahead of you. But to wait for one's adopted uncle to come home while a greedy and violent man is upstairs was one of the worst waits the Baudelaires had ever experienced.

  Daniel Handler

  Uncles, Halloween, Home

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• When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

  J. G. Ballard

  Honesty, Movement, Painting

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• Get out of my way, you cakesniffers!” said a rude, violent, and filthy little girl, shoving the Baudelaire orphans aside as she dashed by.

  Daniel Handler

  Girl, Rude, Littles

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• And a refrigerator may hold a basket of strawberries, which would be important if a maniac said to you, "If you don't give me a basket of strawberries right now, I'm going to poke you with this large stick." But when the two elder Baudelaires and Quigley Quagmire opened the refrigerator, they found nothing that would help someone who was wounded, dying of thirst, or being threatened by a strawberry-crazed, stick-carrying maniac.

  Daniel Handler

  Two, Giving, Important

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• Johnny Depp is like a brother to me. We have matching tattoos on our backs - Charles Baudelaire, the flowers of evil, this giant skeleton thing. It's kind of a secret. People say to us, 'Why did you get that?' And we say, 'No reason.'

  Marilyn Manson

  Tattoo, Brother, Flower

  "This much I know: Marilyn Manson". Interview with Megan Conner, www.theguardian.com. July 14, 2012.

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• Life isn't fair," he said, in his undisguised voice, and for once the Baudelaire orphans agreed with every word the man said.

  Daniel Handler

  Men, Voice, Orphan

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• Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Dream, Mean, Men

  "Degas, Manet, Morisot". Book by Paul Valéry, 1989.

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• The thing about Paris, it's a great city for wandering around and buying shoes and nursing a cafe au lait for hours on end and pretending you're Baudelaire. But it's not a city where you can work.

  Malcolm Mclaren

  Nursing, Shoes, Paris

  "This much I know" by Malcolm McLaren, www.theguardian.com. November 15, 2008.

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• E!" Klaus cried. "E as in Exit!" The Baudelaires ran down E as in Exit, but when they reached the last cabinet, the row was becoming F as in Falling File Cabinets, G as in Go the Other Way! and H as in How in the World Are We Going to Escape?

  Daniel Handler

  Fall, World, Way

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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

  4 Copy quote