“It goes without saying that even those of us who are going to hell will get eternal life—if that territory really exists outside religious books and the minds of believers, that is. Having said that, given the choice, instead of being grilled until hell freezes over, the average sane human being would, needless to say, rather spend forever idling in an extremely fertile garden, next to a lamb or a chicken or a parrot, which they do not secretly want to eat, and a lion or a tiger or a crocodile, which does not secretly want to eat them.”

“Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could have been space and time if I’d known anything about physics.”

“She had thought he was dead, or at least not totally alive, and you could not still be dating someone you believe had an autopsy, so it was not really cheating.”

“Technically, all tattoos are temporary, even permanent ones.”

“In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau’s idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art’s failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.”

“As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.”

“إن الناس إذا أعتقدوا أن تحتضر ، يعطونك كامل اهتمامهم .. إذا كانت هذه هي آخر مرة يرونك فيها يرونك حقًا .. وينسون كل شيء آخر عن دفاتر شيكاتهم وأغاني الراديو و العناية بشعرهم . إنك تظهر باهتمامهم الكامل ..”

“You smell so good,””No, I don’t, I smell like death.””You’re crazy, you’re not dead. You do not smell like death.””I was dead a long time.””And now you’re not. Hence the alive smell.”

“Good thing I’m aging, otherwise I’d be dead.”

“Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.”

“Is there any hope for the dead?”