Paul Verlaine quotes:

I am the Empire at the end of the decadence.

Tears fall in my heart like the rain on the town.

Sap which mounts, and flowers which thrust, Your childhood is a bower: Let my fingers wander in the moss Where glows the rosebud Let me among the clean grasses Drink the drops of dew Which sprinkle the tender flower

A flat black bug, that is London.

La musique avant toute chose.

Prends l'e loquence et tords-lui son cou! Take eloquence and break its neck!

Take eloquence and wring its neck.

The poet is a madman lost in adventure.

A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.

A vast black sleep falls over my life sleep, all hope sleep, all desire.

Here are fruits, flowers, leaves and branches, and here is my heart which beats only for you.

I like this word decadent; all shimmering and purple and gold.

I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the tramp of an invading army sounds.

London, black as crows and noisy as ducks, prudish with all the vices in evidence, everlastingly drunk, in spite of ridiculous laws about drunkenness, immense, though it is really basically only a collection of scandal-mongering boroughs, vying with each other, ugly and dull, without any monuments except interminable docks.

Music before all else, and for that choose the irregular, which is vaguer and melts better into the air...

Your soul is a chosen landscape Where charming masked and costumed figures go Playing the lute and dancing and almost Sad beneath their fantastic disguises. All sing in a minor key Of all-conquering love and careless fortune They do not seem to believe in their happiness And their song mingles with the moonlight. The still moonlight, sad and beautiful, Which gives the birds to dream in the trees And makes the fountain sprays sob in ecstasy, The tall, slender fountain sprays among the marble statues.