Georges Bataille Quotes

He had porcelain-blue eyes that even in a lighted railway car were lost in the clouds, as if he had personally heard the Valkyries’ summons; but no doubt his ear was more attuned to the trumpet-call of the barracks.

I sank into the moist body the way a well-guided plough sinks into earth. The earth beneath that body lay open like a grave; her naked cleft lay open to me like a freshly dug grave... our bodies were quivering like two rows of teeth chattering together.

I can grovel at His feet if I believe He doesn’t exist.

I was jealous of people with a God to hang onto, whereas I … soon all I’d have left would be ‘eyes to cry with’.

I used to shut my eyes and let it shine redly through my lids. The sun was fantastic – it evoked dreams of explosion. Was there anything more sunlike than red blood running over cobblestones, as though light could shatter and kill? Now, in this thick darkness, I’d made myself drunk with light.

All that I had loved during my life rose up like a graveyard of white tombs, in a lunar, spectral light. Fundamentally, this graveyard was a brothel. The funereal marble was alive. In some places it had hair on it.

"We’re like a farmer working his land before the storm, walking down his fields with lowered head, knowing that the hail is bound to fall. And then, as the moment approaches, standing in front of his harvest, he draws himself erect and, as I now am doing" – with no transition, this ludicrous, laughable character became noble: that frail voice, that slick voice of his was imbued with ice – "he pointlessly raises his arms to heaven, waiting for the lightning to strike him – him, and his arms …" As he spoke these words he let his own arms fall. He had become the perfect emblem of some dreadful despair.

Today, I am overjoyed at being an object of horror and repugnance to the one being whom I am bound to... The blank head in which ‘I’ am has become so frightened and greedy that only my death could satisfy it.

Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.

It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

Extreme states of being, whether individual or collective, were once purposefully motivated. Some of those purposes no longer have meaning (expiation, salvation). The well-being of communities is no longer sought through means of doubtful effectiveness, but directly, through action. Under these conditions, extreme states of being fell into the domain of the arts, and not without a certain disadvantage. Literature (fiction) took the place of what had formerly been the spiritual life; poetry (the disorder of words) that of real states of trance. Art constituted a small free domain, outside action: to gain freedom it had to renounce the real world. This is a heavy price to pay, and most writers dream of recovering a lost reality. They must then pay in another sense, by renouncing freedom.