Laurel > Laurel's Quotes

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“Shall each man," cried he, "find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn. Man! You may hate, but beware! Your hours will pass in dread and misery, and soon the bolt will fall which must ravish from you your happiness forever. Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness? You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains—revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food! I may die, but first you, my tyrant and tormentor, shall curse the sun that gazes on your misery. Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful. I will watch with the wiliness of a snake, that I may sting with its venom. Man, you shall repent of the injuries you inflict.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If you die before you say her name, ser, I will hunt you through all seven hells." --Prince Oberyn of Dorne.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“Hateful day when I received life!' I exclaimed in agony. 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemlance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.' - Frankenstein”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.”
― Angela Carter

“I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how.”
― Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop

“There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you.”
― Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

“Our fingernails match our toenails, match our lipstick match our rouge...The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle.”
― Angela Carter, Wise Children

“One beast and only one howls in the woods by night.”
― Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

“His touch both consoles and devastates me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone on the roaring mattress while the lovely, moony night slides through the window to dapple the flanks of this innocent who makes cages to keep the sweet birds in. 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

“I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tissue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“The questions that I ask myself, I think they're very much to do with reality. I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I...I haven't. They're dull things. I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?”
― Angela Carter

“I don't begrudge you my company, my darling. We must all make do with what rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.”
― angela carter

“And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.”
― Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus

“And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place, with its turrets of mistly blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening onto the green and purple, evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day . . . that castle, at home neither on the land nor on the water, a mysterious, amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rocks and waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“There is a vast melancholy in the canticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the forest, endless as these long nights of winter and yet that ghastly sadness, that mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, can never move the heart for not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“We keep the wolves outside by living well.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny's bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“Why do you do up your hair in those tortured plaits, now, Melanie? Why?
Because, she said.
You know that's no answer. You're spoiling your pretty looks, pet. Come here.
She did not move. He ground out his cigarette on the window-ledge and laughed.
Come here, he said again, softly.
So she went.”
― Angela Carter

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. 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, Frankenstein

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel...”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Man," I cried, "how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein