The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was… Continue reading Flannery O’Connor
Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Lippincott’s Monthly, 1890)
But in the expression of the countenance, which was beaming all over with smiles, there still lurked (incomprehensible anomaly!) that fitful stain of melancholy which will ever be found inseparable from the perfection of the beautiful. —Edgar Allan Poe, from “The Assignation,” Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Perennial Classic, 1970)
Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning. ― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Vintage, January 1,… Continue reading Angela Carter
“You,” he said, “are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain. ― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls (The Asylum Emporium; 2nd edition, January 1, 2011)
I, too, can create desolation. — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. Published 1818 (Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones)
Beauty is a form of Genius–is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It… Continue reading Oscar Wilde
But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to… Continue reading Oscar Wilde
I’m tired, tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it. — Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights. (Thomas Cautley Newby December 1847)
She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious. Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay. White porcelain feet, if you like. They have been through fire, and what… Continue reading Oscar Wilde
The Vale of Soul-Making 