Eva Vanrell > Eva's Quotes

“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“What of Art?
-It is a malady.
--Love?
-An Illusion.
--Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
--You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
--What are you?
-To define is to limit.”
― Oscar Wilde , The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -- these are the two things that govern us.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Stories

“A warm bath is a wonderful place for heavy conversation.”
― Eva Vanrell, The Butterfly Crest

“Death does not have the luxury of kindness.”
― Eva Vanrell, The Butterfly Crest

“He would bear the weight of the inevitable in the same stoic manner he had borne it before, etched indelibly into the infinite fabric of his immortal life.”
― Eva Vanrell, The Butterfly Crest

“After several moments, the darkness stirred. Beyond its obsidian surface, she could see the glimmer of stars and stellar flares of red fire burning through the darkness. Frozen clusters of water and gas swam across the current like astral fish with streaming tails of icy dust, and blooms of russet-colored nebulae drifted through the depths like jellyfish.”
― Eva Vanrell, The Butterfly Crest

“The city rose out the ground beneath it like the first sparkling blossom in the fading winter snow. Here, the winter of death was past its zenith. Rather than an ending, it was the beginning of a life renewed—fragile and yet extraordinarily resilient.”
― Eva Vanrell, The Butterfly Crest

“Elena was able to watch as the world around her became fragmented, each piece quickly fading into darkness until they were suspended in time, held aloft by an umbral fabric woven in threads of adamant, gold and copper. If Elena turned her gaze just a fraction of an inch, the fabric disappeared completely. It formed the foundation from which the world around them rebuilt itself, one fragment at a time, until they were standing on solid ground.”
― Eva Vanrell, The Butterfly Crest

“To have a twin in Death was to share an unyielding and apathetic soul. Sleep survived Death's apathy only by virtue of his nature; endless intervals of sleep regenerated a bond that in any other instance would have been destroyed entirely—dispersing their elements into the Void; a god's true death.”
― Eva Vanrell, The Butterfly Crest

“He led them deep into the heart of the palace, to halls that were older and seemingly more esoteric than the ones before. No less whimsical, they reflected a much older race, a race of beings still closely tied to an ancient mysticism worshipped in earthen halls and temples befit of arcane rites.”
― Eva Vanrell

“Let the wild rumpus start!”
― Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

“Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.”
― Lafcadio Hearn, Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn

“The tea ceremony requires years of training and practice ... yet the whole of this art, as to its detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible.”
― Lafcadio Hearn, Lafcadio Hearn's Japan: An Anthology of his Writings on the Country and Its People

“There is scarcely any great author in European literature, old or new, who has not distinguished himself in his treatment of the supernatural. In English literature, I believe there is no exception from the time of the Anglo-Saxon poets to Shakespeare, and from Shakespeare to our own day. And this introduces us to the consideration of a general and remarkable fact, a fact that I do not remember to have seen in any books, but which is of very great philosophical importance: there is something ghostly in all great art, whether of literature, music, sculpture, or architecture. It touches something within us that relates to infinity”
― Lafcadio Hearn

“Perhaps, after trillions of ages burning in different dynasties of suns, the very best of me may come together again.”
― Lafcadio Hearn

“We owe more to our illusions than to our knowledge”
― Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Never laugh at live dragons.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien