“Chaos can be one means of arriving at a definable possibility, but if we look back at the works of Blake’s youth chaos must be understood as something impossible, as a poetic violence and not as a calculated order. The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the universe. All it can be is an awakening in the night, where all that can be heard is anguished poetry let loose.”

― Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil

“If ultimately there was a tantalizing rectitude about her, she was none the less cunning: her exceeding gentleness, howbeit mitigated sometimes by the disturbing oppressiveness that foretells a storm in the air, left me utterly blind.”

― Georges Bataille, My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man

“Night was falling. Farther down, in the half darkness, the city of Trier appeared. It stretched along the far bank of the Moselle, with high square towers rising above it. We little by little lost sight of these towers in the night. As we went across one clearing we saw a house, low but vast, surrounded by arboured gardens. Dorothea spoke of buying the house and living there with me. There was nothing left between us except disillusioned hostility. We could sense it: we mattered little to one another, not, at least, after anxiety abandoned us. We were hurrying towards a hotel room, in a city that we had never seen until the day before. In the darkness we sometimes reached out towards one another’s eyes, not without dread; we were bound together, but we no longer felt the slightest hope. At one turning in the path, an empty space opened beneath us. Curiously, this empty space, at our feet, was no less infinite than a starry sky over our heads. Flickering in the wind, a multitude of little lights was filling the night with silent, indecipherable celebration. Those stars - those candles - were flaming by the hundred on the ground where ranked of lighted graves were massed. We were fascinated by this chasm of funeral stars.”

—Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon 

“But because I was half asleep, I ceased to distinguish between a simplicity that amazed me and the awareness of a vast deception. I suddenly noticed that the universe, the whole universe, whose inconceivable presence commands my attention, was a deception - a prodigious, ingenuous deception. It would be hard for me today to give the meaning of the word, but I know that it had the universe as its object and that there wasn’t anything anywhere that was any different… I surrendered to sleep: it was the only way I could endure what was happening to me.”

—Georges Bataille, L’abbé C 

“Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.”

―Georges Bataille, Eroticism

Georges Bataille: Modern Classics by Penguin Books
My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man; Blue of Noon; Eroticism; L’abbé C; Literature and Evil (From left to right)