Ebony and Crystal Quotes

“It seems to me that I have lived alone—
Alone, as one that liveth in a dream:
As light on coldest marble, or the gleam
Of moons eternal on a land of stone,
The dawns have been to me. I have but known
The silence of a frozen land extreme—
A sole attending silence, all supreme
As is the sea’s enormous monotone.

Upon the icy desert of my days,
No bright mirages are, but iron rays
Of dawn relentless, and the bitter light
Of all-revealing noon.**** Alone, I crave
The friendly clasp of finite arms, to save
My spirit from the ravening Infinite.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose

“A PRECEPT With words of ivory, Of bronze, of ebony, Of alabaster, marble, steel, and gold, The beauty of the visible is told. But how with these express The unseen Loveliness— Splendour and light, and harmony, and sound, The heart hath felt, the sense hath never found? No shining words of stone— Shadow and cloud alone— These shall the poet seek eternally, Whose lines would carve the mask of Mystery.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, Ebony and Crystal

“Here we shall find none or little of the sentimental fat with which so much of our literature is larded. Rather shall one in Imagination’s “misty mid-region,” see elfin rubies burn at his feet, witch-fires glow in the nearer cypresses, and feel upon his brow a wind from the unknown. The brave hunters of fly-specks on Art’s cathedral windows will find little here for their trouble, and both the stupid and the over-sophisticated would best stare owlishly and pass by: here are neither kindergartens nor skyscrapers. But let him who is worthy by reason of his clear eye and unjaded heart wander across these borders of beauty and mystery and be glad. GEORGE STERLING. San Francisco, October 28, 1922.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, Ebony and Crystal