Quotes from Georges Rodenbach

The beauty of sorrow is superior to the beauty of life.

She sinks. She sinks in holy sadness. Like an Ophelia in tears she sinks

The widower reviewed his past in a sunless light which was intensified by the greyness of the November twilight, whilst the bells subtly impregnated the surrounding atmosphere with the melody of sounds that faded like the ashes of dead years.

As he walked, the sad faded leaves were driven pitilessly around him by the wind, and under the mingling influences of autumn and evening, a craving for the quietude of the grave … overtook him with unwanted intensity.

There are women whose love only ends with death.

The beauty of sorrow is superior to the beauty of life.

The pale water which goes away along paths of silence.

The act of writing itself is like an act of love. There is contact. There is exchange too. We no longer know whether the words come out of the ink onto the page, or whether they emerge from the page itself where they were sleeping, the ink merely giving them colour.

The main thing for inner contentment is to be in a state of grace. And there is an artistic state of grace, for art is a kind of religion.

Can there be anything more sad than a girl dying on the day of her first communion, in her new dress. A little bride of death...

Dissonance is as fatal in ailments of the mind as it is in those of the body.

Bruges was his dead wife. And his dead wife was Bruges. The two were united in a like destiny. It was Bruges-la-Morte, the dead town entombed in its stone quais, with the arteries of its canals cold once the great pulse of the sea had ceased beating in them.

without knowing why, he yielded to the temptation of those lips and flung onto them, eating them, partaking of their sacrament... Eucharist of love with a red host!

Bruges had the air of a ghost town. The high towers, the trees along the canals withdrew, absorbed by the same muslin: impenetrable fog with not a single rift. Even the carillon seemed to have to escape, to force its way out of a prison yard filled with cotton wool to be free in the air, to reach the gables over which, every quarter of an hour, the bells poured, like falling leaves, a melancholy autumn of music.

That is the way it is, we always fall in love because of a detail, a nuance. It is a marker we set up for ourselves in the midst of the confusion, in the infinite space of love. The greatest passions come from such little causes.

Ornamentation, festoons, carvings, cartouches, bas-reliefs, countless surprises among the sculptures - and the tones of the facades weathered by time and rain, the pinks of fading twilight, smoky blues, misty greys, a richness of mildew, brickwork ripened by the years, the hues of a ruddy or anaemic complexion.

The only man who is truly happy is a man who has an idée fixe. It takes up his every minute, fills any empty spaces in his thought, sneaks unexpected pleasures into his boredom, gives direction to his idle hours, again and again enlivens the stagnant waters of existence with a surging current.

On dirait que les projets de joie sont un défi.Trop longuement préparés,ils laissent le temps à la detinée de changer les oeufs dans le nid,et ce sont les chagrins qui nous faudra couver.

The windows let in a perfect light, a vibrant light such as you get in the north, where a kind of grey gauze turns the sun to silver. And such solitude, such quiet.

Oh, the joy of the arrival of a child, which is both the one and the other, a mirror in which husband and wife, who love each other, can see each other in one single face.

They sensed that nothing needed to be said. In silence, minds understand each other.

He felt alone, prey to the tedium, to the dreariness of time, especially at the approach of twilight which, during those late-autumn days, came in through the windows, settling on the furniture with a leaden pallor, sending the mirrors into mourning at light's farewell ...

A great melancholy was hanging in the air, giving their love a more languid, more tender feeling. It was like the love one feels before a separation, it was like love in a country where there is a war, in a town where epidemics are raging. A strong love, from feeling close to death. Here death reigned, it was as if the town were the Museum of Death. (The Dead Town)

Is it not strange how quickly one can become detached from everything? How empty life appears when one is close to death!