Lily > Lily's Quotes

“You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.”
― Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.”
― Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“I have been in love with no one, and never shall," she whispered, "unless it should be with you."
How beautiful she looked in the moonlight!
Shy and strange was the look with which she quickly hid her face in my neck and hair, with tumultuous sighs, that seemed almost to sob, and pressed in mine a hand that trembled.
Her soft cheek was glowing against mine. "Darling, darling," she murmured, "I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so."
I started from her.
She was gazing on me with eyes from which all fire, all meaning had flown, and a face colorless and apathetic.
"Is there a chill in the air, dear?" she said drowsily. "I almost shiver; have I been dreaming? Let us come in. Come; come; come in.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“If your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“You are afraid to die?'
Yes, everyone is.'
But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars when they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structures.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“but curiosity is a restless and scrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“I have never been in love with no one, and never shall," she whispered, "unless it should be with you.”
― Sheridan le Fanu, Carmilla

“The moon, this night," she said, "is full of idyllic and magnetic influence - and see, when you look behind you at the front of the schloss how all its windows flash and twinkle with that silvery splendor, as if unseen hands had lighted up the rooms to receive fairy guests.”
― J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night's fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of depts being wiped clean. I say you do not have a name.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“You liked me best when I was like an oil painting; perfectly arranged and silent.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. I suppose both are a sort of gentle violence, putting down in ink what scorches the air when spoken aloud.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“Even loneliness, hollow and cold, becomes so familiar it starts to feel like a friend.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I will render you as you really were, neither cast in pristine stained glass or unholy fire. I will make you into nothing more than a man, tender and brutal in equal measure, and perhaps in doing so I will justify myself to you. To my own haunted conscience.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I made you into my private Christ, supplicated with my own dark devotions. Nothing existed beyond the range of your exacting gaze, not even me. I was simply a non-entity when you weren't looking at me, an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the sweet water of your attention.
A woman can't live like that, my Lord. No one can. Don't ask me why I did it.
God, forgive me.
Christ, forgive me.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I lost myself so entirely in charting the contours of my love for you that there wasn't any room for tracking time. There wasn't any room to examine the past or the future, there was only the eternal now.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I have one final promise to make to you, one I hope I will never break. I promise to live, richly and shamelessly and with my arms wide open to the world. If there was any part left of you at the end that wished our our great happiness, that truly wanted what was best for us, I think it would be pleased to hear me say it. I do not know if I have justified my choice to you, but I think I have justified it to myself, and that has brought me peace enough.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“I dove down deep into your psyche, turning over every word you gave me like a jewel. Looking for meaning, seeking out the mysteries of you. I didn't care if I lost myself in the process. I wanted to be brought by the hand into your world and disappear into your kiss until us two could no longer be told apart.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“You must never overthink any good and pleasurable thing.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“Like Christ, I had become intimately acquainted with violence and the sins of the world, but I had not come away unblemished.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“(...) but the melancholy always came back, calling on her like an unwelcome old lover disrupting a wedding.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood

“Even if you were sunlight itself, I would still scorch myself to be close to you.”
― S.T. Gibson, A Dowry of Blood