Phil Baker > Quotes

“If i had it all to do again there would be more bodies.”
― Phil Baker

“Symbolism and surrealism overlap in the way they give primacy to mental reality over objective reality, and this in turn gives rise to a certain kind of space. ("Introduction")”
― Phil Baker

“The meat market itself was probably a greater influence on Spare than his first school. It offered a spectacle of thousands of animal carcasses, which arrived under the market by a specially built railway before being displayed and disposed of at ground level.”
― Phil Baker, Austin Osman Spare: The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist

“It was during this final Parisian period of Rodenbach's life that his literary absorption in Bruges really rose and flowered. Bruges-La-Morte was the Paris literary sensation of 1892, and he followed it with La Vocation in 1895, and Le Carilloneur (translated as The Bells of Bruges) in 1897. This kind of immersion at a distance is hardly unknown - think of Joyce, minutely anatomizing Dublin in Ulysses while living in Trieste - but it is also quintessentially Symbolist in its concern with the richness and plenitude of absence: 'The essence of art that is in any way noble is the DREAM,' wrote Rodenbach, 'and this dream dwells only upon what is distant, absent, vanished, unattainable.' (Introduction)”
― Phil Baker, Hans Cadzand's Vocation & Other Stories