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To everyone who felt you never fit in, and learned the hard way that you don’t have to. Being different is your double-edged sword. One day, you’ll find your shield to match.
here I opened wide the door;— Darkness there, and nothing more. —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”
then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. —Bram Stoker, Dracula
Quoth the raven, “Nevermore!” —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”
There was nothing scarier than a blind old woman with whites for eyes suddenly gripping your arm under a full moon night.
Black. It was the absence of color, the keeper of dark, the abyss of unknowns. It was her hair, her mama’s clothes, the vast sky all around them. She loved black.
ten-year-old Corvina looked around at the darkness and felt at home. If her mother was a freak, then maybe so was she. After all, sometimes she heard the voices, too.
We are each our own devil and we make this world our hell. —Oscar Wilde, The Duchess of Padua
Her mother, even while awake, had barely spoken to Corvina outside of teaching her. Books had become her refuge, especially books with men—humans, shapeshifters, or aliens—who fell in love hard and claimed their women, body and soul. Those were her favorite.
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die. —H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Silver-eyed devil, that’s what we called him. And he’s got this premature gray streak of hair that just works so good for him,
It was a voice she’d heard all her life. It was a voice of comfort, something that left a sweet fragrance of sandalwood in her head. The first time she’d heard him, she’d called him Mo. Mo had always been with her, guiding her, and she knew better than to ignore his advice.
He was sitting in the semi-darkness, dressed all in black, the sleeves of his sweater pushed up his forearms, his eyes closed as he bent forward, the line of his jaw chiseled square and shadowed with stubble, a lock of his dark hair falling forward. He was … magnificent. Beautiful in the way pain was beautiful, because it tugged at the chest and made something visceral come alive in the stomach and caused blood to simmer in the veins. Enchanting in the way she imagined dark magic was, because it twisted the air around it and warped the mind and overpowered the senses. Haunting in the way only
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Because the light eyes and the streak of white hair meant only one thing—she’d just encountered the silver-eyed devil of Verenmore.
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. —Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”
The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter—often an unconscious but still a truthful interpreter—in the eye. —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. —Edgar Allan Poe, letter to G. W. Eveleth
“Steer clear of me, little crow,” he muttered, his eyes piercing, flaying her open. “You might be a luring siren but I’m no ordinary sailor. I’m a mad pirate and I’m trying to resist your call. If I land on your shores, I will plunder and take away everything worth having. Be very careful giving me those eyes.”
There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood. —Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Table Talk”
She detailed to him the traditional appearance of these monsters, and his horror was increased… —John William Polidori, “The Vampyre”
“It makes me want things, little crow.” “Things like what?” she whispered, her heart in her throat, her gaze locked with his. “Things like my fist in your hair and my tongue in your mouth,” he told her harshly, the lines of his face strained. “Things like fucking you in front of the boy who held your hand, just to tell him you’ll never be his. Things like bending you over my desk after class and telling you to wrap your lips around my cock like you do with your pencil.”
“This is lust,” she whispered, trying to validate it, excuse it. “No, Corvina.” The side of his lips twitched. “I’ve known lust. This is something worse. This is a barbaric need to possess, to eliminate, to own. This is madness.”
“If this is madness,” she whispered almost against his lips, “drown me in it.” “Jesus fuck.” The expletive left his mouth right before he closed the distance, crashing his lips over hers.
“If this is madness,” he told her, echoing her words against her lips, “I’ve already descended too far.”
Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do. —William Shakespeare, As You Like It
I have crossed oceans of time to find you. —Bram Stoker’s Dracula
“I’m going to fuck you so raw you’ll never get me out. This time is mine. This pussy is mine.”
Black is such a happy color. —The Addams Family
The hearts of both had drunk so deeply of a passion which both now tasted for the first time. —Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
“It’s just that I prefer happier endings. Tragedies are beautiful, but they always take more than they give. A story can be tragic, but it doesn’t have to end as one.”
It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn. —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
But he that dares not grasp the thorn Should never crave the rose. —Anne Brontë, “The Narrow Way”
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. —Albert Einstein
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul. —Pablo Neruda, “Sonnet XVII”
“I don’t know what I don’t see, what I don’t fear!” —Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
“I’m in your head, in your blood, in your very veins. I’ve claimed you before anything else ever could. Your body, your heart, your mind, your fucking soul, it’s all mine. Your hunger is mine to feed, your madness is mine to tame. Do you feel that?”
Mine first—mine last—mine even in the grave! —Louisa May Alcott, A Long Fatal Love Chase
Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! —Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
“You’re taking all of my firsts, Mr. Deverell,” she whispered quietly as a confession. His arm tightened. “I will take all your lasts, too, Miss Clemm. Mark my words.”
Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey. —Lord Byron, The Giaour
“This will last until the day the roses on my grave stop sharing roots with the roses on yours,” he declared. “I will have you even in death, little witch. I am your beast. I am your madness. And you, you’re my afterlife.”
Her mind, long harassed by distress, now yielded to imaginary terrors. —Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho
I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul. —Bram Stoker, Dracula
It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright. —Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity. —Edvard Munch, Letters 1893–1899
I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other. —Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
“You’re the mountain I build my castle on, brick by brick,” she whispered to him, her eyes stinging. “You stand, I soar. You crack, I crumble.”
I, myself, am strange and unusual. —Beetlejuice
