More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
the really weird artist has a kind of vision which makes models, or summons up what amounts to actual scenes from the spectral world he lives in.
Daily life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with
concealed rottenness as in Beardsley’s best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Doré.
He was conscious, as one who united imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual observances;
That allowable rhymes have real advantages of a positive sort is an opinion by no means lightly to be denied. The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect
succession of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines.
Another advantage is the greater latitude allowed for the expression of thought. How numerous are the writers who, from restriction to perfect rhyming, are frequently compelled to abandon a neat epigram or brilliant antithesis, which allowable rhyme would easily permit,...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.
To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles. In considering ourselves, we think too much of ethics and sociology—too little of plain natural history. We should perceive that man’s period of
historical existence, a period so short that his physical constitution has not been altered in the slightest degree, is insufficient to a...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The instincts that governed the Egyptians and the Assyrians of old, govern us as well; and as the ancients thought, grasped, struggled, and deceived, so shall we moderns continue to think, grasp, struggle, and deceive in ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The man or nation of high culture may acknowledge to great lengths the restraints imposed by conventions and honour, but beyond a certain point primitive will or desire cannot be curbed. Denied anything ardently desired, the individual or state will argue and parley just so long—then, if the impelling motive be sufficiently great, will cast aside every rule and break
down every acquired inhibition, plunging viciously after the object wished; all the more fantastically savage because of previous repression.
The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to p...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
ambitions. In disillusioned diplomacy, ample armament, and universal training alone will be found the solution of the world’s difficulties. It will not be a perfect solution, because humanity is not perfect. It will
not abolish war, because war is the expression of a natural human tendency. But it will at least produce an approximate stability of social and political conditions, and prevent the menace of the entire world by the greed of any one of its constituent parts.
In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively considered; and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown.
The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind.
The dog would appear to me to be the favourite of superficial, sentimental, emotional, and democratic people—people who feel rather than think, who attach importance to mankind and the popular conventional emotions of the simple, and
who find their greatest consolation in the fawning and dependent attachments of a gregarious society. Such people live in a limited world of imagination; accepting uncritically the values of common folklore, and always preferring to have their naive beliefs, feelings, and prejudices tickled, rather than to enjoy a purely aesthetic and philosophic pleasure arising from discrimination, contemplation, and the recognition of austere absolute beauty. This is not to say that the cheaper emotions do not also reside in the average cat-lover’s
lover’s love of cats, but merely to point out that in ailurophily there exists a basis of true aestheticism which kynophily does not possess. The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such. He is u...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
does not fall into the fallacy that pointless sociability and friendliness, or slavering devotion and obedience, constitute anything intrinsically admirable or exalted. Dog-lovers base their whole case on these commonplace, servile, and plebeian qualities, and amusingly judge the intelligence of a pet by its degree of conformity to their own wishes.
Beauty—coolness—aloofness—philosophic repose—self-sufficiency—untamed mastery—where else can we
find these things incarnated with even half the perfection and completeness that mark their incarnation in the peerless and softly gliding cat, which performs its mysterious orbit with the relentless and unobtrusive certainty of a planet in infinity?
Practical plebeian folk judge a thing only by its
immediate touch, taste, and smell; while more delicate types form their estimates from the linked images and ideas which the object calls up in their minds.
Dogs are the hieroglyphs of blind emotion, inferiority, servile attachment, and gregariousness—the attributes of commonplace, stupidly passionate, and intellectually and imaginatively undeveloped men. Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride,
freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality—the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men. The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman.
The dog gives, but the cat is.
It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolised master of a dog whose instinct it is to idolise, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a philosophic cat who is wholly his own master and could easily choose another companion if he found such an
one more agreeable and interesting.
The cat is classic whilst the dog is Gothic—nowhere
Such an one usually passes the problem off in an epigrammatic paradox, and says ‘that Snookums is so homely, he’s pretty!’ This is the childish penchant for the grotesque and tawdrily ‘cute’, which we see likewise embodied in popular cartoons, freak dolls, and all the malformed decorative trumpery of the ‘Billiken’ or ‘Krazy Kat’ order found in the ‘dens’ and ‘cosy corners’ of the would-be sophisticated cultural yokelry.
a proud and beautiful equal in the peerage of individualism rather than a cowed and cringing satellite in the hierarchy of fear,
the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.
These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear
is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear. The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Conflict wi...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
unknown outer space,
dreams
Remove all possible superfluities—words, sentences, paragraphs, or whole episodes or elements—observing
the maintenance of a careful realism
marvel
Being the principal thing in the story, its mere existence should overshadow the characters and events. But the characters and events must be consistent and natural except where they touch the single marvel.
Never have a wonder taken for granted.
Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel.
A casual style ruins any seri...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
