Debauched Quotes

Once, I discovered it propped up on my sister's pillow, its neck wrapped in one of our mother's best linen dishtowels. Cookie fragments on dolls' plates were laid out around it, mixed with berries from the prickly-berry hedge, like offerings made to appease an idol. It was wearing a chaplet woven of carrot fronds and marigolds that my sister and Leonie had picked in the garden. The flowers were wilted, the garland was lopsided; the effect was astonishingly depraved, as if a debauched Roman emperor had arrived on the scene and had hacked off his own body in a maiden's chamber as the ultimate sexual thrill. ~ Margaret Atwood

On principle' a man can do anything, take part in anything and himself remain inhuman and indeterminate. 'On principle' a man may interest himself in the founding of a brothel, and the same man can 'on principle' assist in the publication of a new Hymn book because it is supposed to be the great need of the times. But it would be as unjustifiable to conclude from the first fact that he was debauched as it would, perhaps, be to conclude from the second that he read or sang hymns. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

They want to hold on to you and your people. They have isolated the ones who might grow powerful and overthrow their debauched reign. ~ Walter Mosley

Just what does a virgin wife have to do to get debauched? Teena really wanted to know. Offering herself hadn't worked. Telling her husband he would be her one and only seemed to set off a state of panic. Would she have to tie Dmitri down and have her way with him? ~ Eve Langlais

Contrary to popular cable TV-induced opinion, aerobics have nothing to do with squeezing our body into hideous shiny Spandex, grinning like a deranged orangutan, and doing cretinous steps to debauched disco music. ~ Cynthia Heimel

Bree arched, trying to stretch out her muscles and Alessandro gave her a dirty look as if she was displaying herself to him on purpose. Well, maybe she was a little. Even though he blocked her from the hotel attendant's gaze with his body in the doorway, Bree was sure to cover herself with the blanket. Alessandro turned around, pulling in the tray with him and his eyes flared hungrily as he looked down at her. "You look like a beautiful debauched angel," he said, his voice rough with desire. "And you're what, the demon that's corrupted me?" Bree asked raising an eyebrow and letting the blanket fall down to her waist, baring her to him. "It's my life's work, you know?" Alessandro grinned, going down on to his knees and leaning over her. Bree placed a hand on his chest, halting him. "Is that coffee, I smell?" she asked. "The debauched angel is kind of hungry." She bit her lip and smiled up at his frustrated face. ~ E. Jamie

Jack, you have debauched my sloth. ~ Patrick O'Brian

I had no songs in my repertoire for commercial radio anyway. Songs about debauched bootleggers, mothers that drowned their own children, Cadillacs that only got five miles to the gallon, floods, union hall fires, darkness and cadavers at the bottom of rivers weren't for radiophiles. There was nothing easygoing about the folk songs I sang. They weren't friendly or ripe with mellowness. They didn't come gently to the shore. I guess you could say they weren't commercial.

Not only that, my style was too erratic and hard to pigeonhole for the radio, and songs, to me, were more important that just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. Greil Marcus, the music historian, would some thirty years later call it "the invisible republic."

Whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambitions to stir things up. i just thought of popular culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it.

I didn't know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs taught me that. ~ Bob Dylan

The brown earth, the torn, blasted earth, with a greasy shine under the sun's rays; the earth is the background of this restless, gloomy world of automatons, our gasping is the scratching of a quill, our lips are dry, our heads are debauched with stupor - thus we stagger forward, and into our pierced and shattered souls bores the torturing image of the brown earth with the greasy sun and the convulsed and dead soldiers, who lie there - it can't be helped - who cry and clutch at our legs as we spring away over them. We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

He was going to win this bout, then fuck her with the unchained, debauched craving of a man condemned to die at dawn. ~ Armada West

This fine young man had all the inclination to be a profligate of the first water, and only lacked the one good trait in the common catalogue of debauched vices - open-handedness - to be a notable vagabond. But there his griping and penurious habits stepped in; and as one poison will sometimes neutralise another, when wholesome remedies would not avail, so he was restrained by a bad passion from quaffing his full measure of evil, when virtue might have sought to hold him back in vain. ~ Charles Dickens

Quite possibly one of the most revealing passages about Shakespeare as a man comes from one of the roughest of the jottings made by gossip John Aubrey from his interview with William Beeston, son of the Christopher Beeston who had acted with Shakespeare's company. The partly cancelled note reads: 'the more to be admired, he was not a company keeper. [He] ... wouldn't be debauched, and if invited to, writ [i.e. wrote] he was in pain.' [Ch.24] ~ Ian Wilson

Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf. ~ Anton Chekhov

Everybody knows that the soul of a cat is formed from the composite souls of nine debauched nuns who failed in their vows. ~ Barry Hughart

The problem with today's young people', I said, 'isn't that they do things which are bad for them, as so much of the media likes to think. It's that they don't do these things right. You're all so intent on getting off your heads on drugs that you don't think about the fact that you could overdose and, to put it plainly, die. You drink until your liver explodes. You smoke until your lungs collapse beneath the rot. You create diseases which threaten to wipe you out. Have fun, by all means. Be debauched, it's your duty. But be wise about it. All things in excess, but just know how to cope with them, that's all I ask. ~ John Boyne

Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible. ~ Janice Rogers Brown

She [Mme Sazerat] did not offer her hand, but smiled at my mother with vague melancholy as one smiles at a playmate from one's childhood, but with whom all connection has been severed because she has lived a debauched life, married a jailbird or, worse still, a divorced man. ~ Marcel Proust

Few men had been as cavalier and as debauched as the Président, but completely jaded, utterly torpid, all he was left with now was the depravity and turpitude of libertinage. ~ Marquis De Sade

Oh, alas, alas for his debauched children, flesh of his flesh, heir to all his failings and none of his strenghts! ... was it hard to judge a ten-year-old boy in this way? Yes, of course it was, but these were not boys. They were little gods, the despots of the future: born, unfortunately, to rule. He loved them. They would betray him. They were the lights of his life. They would come for him while he slept. The little assfuckers. He was waiting for their moves. ~ Salman Rushdie

On the American Oligarchy

"How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience.

"And what about it?" Martin retorted. "The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters–not the great, virile noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you all over again–but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajoling and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling today in this trade-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of your slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed. ~ Jack London

If I killed my wife and mother and debauched a thousand women I couldn't go to hell
in fact, I couldn't go to hell if I wanted to. ~ Bill Foster

The bus I am riding on must be on its way to a garbage convention. Never before has a more rancid assemblage of people congregated. I am at this moment privy to a momentous moment in the history of human smell. My name will probably be memorized by future students, preparing to answer this frequently asked exam question: Who demonstrated a supernatural ability to remain conscious on the most disgusting vehicle to ever disturb our debauched world? ~ Emily R. Austin

A book indeed sometimes debauched me from my work ... ~ Benjamin Franklin

We have this idea of artists being on the fringe and being debauched and strange. I don't think that people who commit themselves to classical arts should be exempt from that. ~ Lola Kirke

The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy the gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people; then shall we both deserve and enjoy it. While on the other hand, if we are universally vicious and debauched in our manners, though the form of our Constitution carries the face of the most exalted freedom, we shall in reality be the most abject slaves. ~ Samuel Adams

We need to stop excusing mediocre and downright pernicious art, stop 'taking it for what it's worth' as we take our fast foods, our overpriced cars that are no good, the overpriced houses we spend all our lives fixing, our television programs, our schools thrown up like barricades in the way of young minds, our brainless fat religions, our poisonous air, our incredible cult of sports, and our ritual of fornicating with all pretty or even horse-faced strangers. We would not put up with a debauched king, but in a democracy all of us are kings, and we praise debauchery as pluralism. This book is of course no condemnation of pluralism; but it is true that art is in one sense fascistic: it claims, on good authority, that some things are healthy for individuals and society and some things are not. ~ John Gardner

The ads made me feel bilious and love-stricken, invaded and debauched by a coldly mechanical lust for whatever fetish the desire machines were pushing at their victims at any given instant. ~ Charles Stross

We feel something like respect for consistency even in error. We lament the virtue that is debauched into a vice; but the vice that affects a virtue becomes the more detestable. ~ Thomas Paine

She's certain that I intend to lure Lilly into the debauched harem that I maintain in the opium dens of Paris." He turned her toward the lane. "Be so good as to thwart me from this evil scheme. You can begin by distracting me with a walk to the post office."
She smiled, though it was slightly watery. "I see that it's my Christian duty, when you put it so. I only hope I may not succumb to your wicked plot myself."
"Oh, I have far more sinister plans for you. I mean to entice you to a dish of tea in the public parlor at the Antlers. I will certainly set a chair for you, and possibly I may even speak French. ~ Laura Kinsale

I have to leave," he whispered against her hair.
"No, stay." Her face turned, her lips nuzzling the bare skin of his chest. "Stay all night. Stay forever."
He smiled and kissed her temple. "I would. But somehow I think your family would take exception to my debauching you before we were properly betrothed."
"I don't feel debauched."
"I do," Matthew said.
Daisy smiled. "I'd better marry you, then. ~ Lisa Kleypas

On the other hand, a flaccid, moping, debauched mollusc, tired from too much love and loose-nerved from general world conditions, can be a shameful thing served raw upon the shell. ~ M.F.K. Fisher

From this perspective, we were all divine Shakespeares, creating and playing the roles of muscled heroes and conniving villains, pious saints and debauched sinners, corrupt CEOs and disinterested temp workers. ~ Jonathan Talat Phillips

It is not then the existence or the non-existence, of the persons that I trouble myself about; it is the fable of Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it as it is told, is blasphemously obscene. It gives an account of a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement, she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost. ~ Thomas Paine

Grady and Preston were both after the same mark in Paris a few years ago," Julian said to
Zane. "They met during what I hear was a drunken, debauched night of ... selling antiques. That's how
I knew Ty had been there. I never saw him."
"Such unnecessary details," Preston murmured.
"Ty, seriously," Zane grunted.
"How is this my fault?" Ty asked in exasperation.
"Do you have a history with every guy with a gun in the Northern hemisphere?"
"Oh, like you don't have some winners back there you hope we never run into. Let's head to
Miami and see what comes out of the woodwork."
"Ty."
"I like guys with guns!"
"Oh my God," Julian muttered as he rubbed at his eyes. ~ Abigail Roux