Strange Tale of Panorama Island Quotes

“Art, according to him, was the revolt of humans against nature. It was none other than the expression of a human being’s dissatisfaction with the way things are and his desire to imprint his own individual personality upon nature.”
― Edogawa Rampo, Strange Tale of Panorama Island

“If beauty gains in depth when colored by fear, then there is probably nothing more beautiful in the world than the spectacle at the bottom of the sea.”
― Edogawa Rampo, Strange Tale of Panorama Island

“After seeing the various fantastic sights, a visitor to Panorama Island would have had to gasp in amazement at this unsurpassable view. He would have had the impression that the entire island was a rose floating on the vast ocean and that the giant scarlet flower of an opium dream was conversing on an equal footing with the sun in the sky, just the two of them. What kind of strange beauty had that incomparable simplicity and grandeur created? Some travelers might have recalled the world of myth that their distant ancestors had seen. . . .

How can the author describe the madness and debauchery, the pleasures of revelry and drunkenness, the numberless games of life and death that were played day and night on that magnificent stage? You readers might find something that resembled it, in part, in your most fantastic, bloodiest, and most beautiful nightmares.”
― Rampo Edogawa, Strange Tale of Panorama Island

“I’ll just say that in the face of the power of money the word “impossible” does not exist, and leave it at that.”
― Edogawa Rampo, Strange Tale of Panorama Island

“There must have been a time in this world when humans realized for the first time the beauty that resides in the sinuosity of a curve.”
― Edogawa Rampo, Strange Tale of Panorama Island

“When he recalled it later, he would realize that his feeling at the time was akin to sleepwalking, and that though he was about to carry out his plan, he felt strangely empty, as if that great plan were some casual pleasure trip that he was setting out on. But somewhere in a corner of his mind lurked the consciousness that what he was doing was actually a dream and that there was another real world waiting for him on the other side of the dream.”
― Edogawa Rampo, Strange Tale of Panorama Island