Dannii Elle > Recent Status Updates

"Love, the double fury, engendering the exhaustion of itself, passes, at its climax, into death. Just as the spring engenders summer and then dies of its own excess into the autumn and the winter. The fulfilment of love is death, no matter how long the corpse goes on walking."

"I have a story to relate which proves that Love, with no blood on its knife, does not sleep easily, if it sleeps at all, until every one of its devotees lies dead. The great destroyer... I warn you that as you lie in your bed and feel the determination of your lover slipping its blade between your ribs, this is the real consummation. “Kill me, kill me,” you murmur. But it always surprises you when you die."

"Bombs are bigger, but the human brains they burst remain the same."

"So tonight we will put the whole untidy world into a nest, and it will hang swinging comfortably as if it were as far away and as glossed over by history as the Red Indian's right to be free."

"The eyes of the jealous world peer through the peephole in the door, in the eyes of the keeper. But still the only torture is his absence."

"She is the innocent who is always the offering. She is the goddess of all things which the vigour of living destroys."

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti - 5/5 stars

The Dream Woman by Wilkie Collins - 3.5/5 stars

The Body-Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson - 4/5 stars

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - 5/5 stars

The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe - 5/5 stars

The Old Nurse's Story by Elizabeth Gaskell - 5/5 stars

The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy - 4/5 stars

The Wedding-Knell by Nathaniel Hawthorne - 3/5 stars

Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe - 3.5/5 stars

The Song of Wandering Aengus by William Butler Yeats - 4/5 stars

Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning - 5/5 stars

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe - 5/5 stars

"The library knows its own mind... When it steals a boy, we let it keep him."

HA! Hindsight is a wonderful thing!

“For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.”

"it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”

"And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within...and thus — for there is no stopping damp; it gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork — sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes."

"society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever. Such monsters the poets and the novelists alone can deal with; with such something-nothings their works are stuffed out to prodigious size; and to them with the best will in the world we are content to leave it.”

It's odd to reread this series with knowledge of what comes after. It is tainting how I view every interaction between these characters.

"Forbid a man something and he craves it like his soul's salvation."

" 'Better is it', she thought, 'to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others; better be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the humane spirit, which are... contemplation, solitude, love.' ”

“No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal Party and Labour Party - for what do they battle except their own prestige?"

"The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose."

"Violence was all. The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practise. Girls were roses, and their seasons were short as the flowers."