Necrophilia Variations Quotes

Only art can make the future love you, and that is what art is about: attraction at a distance, seduction from the past, inveiglement from beyond the grave. Art is a plea to love me when I’m gone. And yet, I thought to myself, who could love what I do? Who could possibly love me for this?

I loved my wounds, not because they hurt but because they were like a gun in my pocket. They gave me a power that no one knew I had.

What do soy beans and vibrators have in common? They're both meat substitutes.

God forbid we should both go to heaven. Its endlessness would make us hate each other. Better for you to be in heaven and me in hell. We would long for each other, dream of each other, idealize each other. You would rail against God, since he was keeping you from consummating your love. I would send smoke signals from my pit of brimstone - love letters that smelled like sulfur and made you choke. Maybe we would even try to sneak off to purgatory for illicit rendezvous.

Beauty is relative — right! Do you realize that that, if true, is a veritable abyss?

Only art can make the future love you, and that is what art is about: attraction at a distance, seduction from the past, inveiglement from beyond the grave.

I am Death, and when I love you it’s forever.

If a dying man masturbates, is it necrophilia?

I looked at the headline: “The Devil Made Him Do It." It was an opinion piece about the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and the “disjointed" but “grotesque" remarks he had made at a press conference. Lamenting the relative impotence of the arts in comparison to terrorism, Stockhausen had called the attacks “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos." I guess he thought of it as a Wagnerian spectacle, an opera of airplanes and towers. “Five thousand people are dispatched into eternity, in a single moment," he said. “I couldn’t do that. In comparison with that, we’re nothing as composers.

Maybe perversion was not illness at all. Maybe every form of deviance was just a potential force of union and community, one that had not yet organized itself into political lobbies, self-help groups, bowling leagues...Once you grant legitimacy to one sexual proclivity, what's to stop the others from demanding their rights too?

Art, to me, was a research laboratory,

Every vagina would be my grave, every clitoris my headstone, and by way of tribute perhaps you could even shave my epitaph into your pubic hair.

If familiarity breeds contempt, just imagine how familiar you can get with a person after a thousand or a million years. God forbid we should both go to heaven. Its endlessness would make us hate each other. Better for you to be in heaven and me in hell.

I thought about Stockhausen. What had prompted him to call the attacks a work of art? For him, I thought, it was not a matter of finding death beautiful, but rather seeing that someone had taken liberties in reality that an artist could only dream of. That was both the virtue and the vice of art. In art, you can kill with impunity—destroy the world, perpetrate a holocaust, whip up the apocalypse. But it’s only art. You can blow up five million people in an opera and not have anywhere near the impact of blowing up five thousand in reality. Stockhausen seemed to realize this, since the terrorism caused him to feel that being a composer was nothing. In that sense, his words were a moral statement about the limits of art, not an immoral statement about aestheticizing destruction.

You would rail against God, since He was keeping you from consummating your love. I would send smoke signals from my pit of brimstone — love letters that smelled like sulfur and made you choke.

I am Death, and when I love you it’s forever.