Danse Macabre Quotes

JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN stands with his hands behind his back, beside
the piano, listening to FRIDA FOLDAL, who is playing the last
bars of the "Danse Macabre.


BORKMAN.
Can you guess where I first heard tones like these?

FRIDA.
[Looking up at him.] No, Mr. Borkman.

BORKMAN.
It was down in the mines.

FRIDA.
[Not understanding.] Indeed? Down in the mines?

BORKMAN.
I am a miner's son, you know. Or perhaps you did not know?

FRIDA.
No, Mr. Borkman.

BORKMAN.
A miner's son. And my father used sometimes to take me with
him into the mines. The metal sings down there.

FRIDA.
Really? Sings?

BORKMAN.
[Nodding.] When it is loosened. The hammer-strokes that loosen
it are the midnight bell clanging to set it free; and that is why
the metal sings--in its own way--for gladness.

FRIDA.
Why does it do that, Mr. Borkman?

BORKMAN.
It wants to come up into the light of day and serve mankind. ~ Henrik Ibsen

Accounts from Europe indicate that the danse macabre took another form, inspired by the Black Death, rather like our children's rhyme 'Ring o' Ring o' Roses', which refers to the Great Plague. In 1374, a fanatical sect of dancers appeared in the Rhine, convinced that they could put an end to the epidemic by dancing for days and allowing other people to trample on their bodies. It is not recorded whether they recovered but, incredibly, they began to raise money from bystanders. By the time they reached Cologne they were 500 strong, dancing like demons, half-naked with flowers in their hair. Regarded as a menace by the authorities, these dancers macabre were threatened with excommunication. ~ Catharine Arnold

By today's sensibilities, it's more than a little macabre that a great moral movement would adopt as its symbol a graphic representation of a revolting means of torture and execution. ~ Steven Pinker

The macabre who lived through the war have a story they loved to tell about the soldiers of the Foreign Legion giving a ball in the expanses around Verdun and dancing with the corpses. Alabama's continued brewing of the poisoned filter for a semiconscious banquet table, her insistence on the magic and glamor of life when she was already feeling its pulse like the throbbing of an amputated leg, had something of the same sinister quality. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

I do not believe that there is anything inherently and unavoidably ugly about industrialism. A factory or even a gasworks is not obliged of its own nature to be ugly, any more than a palace or a dog-kennel or a cathedral. . . . But in any case, though the ugliness of industrialism is the most obvious thing about it and the thing every newcomer exclaims against, I doubt whether it is centrally important. And perhaps it is not even desirable, industrialism being what it is, that it should learn to disguise itself as something else. As Mr Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a dark Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like the temple of mysterious and splendid gods. Moreover, even in the worst of the industrial towns one sees a great deal that is not ugly in the narrow aesthetic sense. A belching chimney or a stinking slum is repulsive chiefly because it implies warped lives and ailing children. Look at it from a purely aesthetic standpoint and it may have a certain macabre appeal. I find that anything outrageously strange generally ends by fascinating me even when I abominate it. ~ George Orwell

Of the name and abode of this man but little is written, for they were of the waking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to know that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, and that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not on the fields and groves but on a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair.
- "Azathoth" from Dagon and Other Macabre Tales ~ H.P. Lovecraft

I find pieces of her
In songs, book quotes,
Even in the dismal corners
Of macabre streets
Hosting nobody except
Failed men and women ~ Hanna Abi Akl

She is entirely in her closed eyes, and quite alone with her soul, in the bosom of the most intimate attention ... She feels in herself that she is becoming some event. ~ Paul Valery

Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre. ~ Gore Vidal

Simple and predictable seem pretty darn tantalizing when you're a witch.
Lately, I've wished for a lot of things to be the way they were. Gone are my lust
for the macabre and the sweetly sinful fantasies of meeting a vampire. Something
about unconscious people slumped against the dark leather of the booths at
crimson made it less sexy. ~ Cyrese Covelli

It was a season known for the macabre nature in humans to manifest, a night thought to thinly veil the fabric of dimensions…of course all of which – despite whether being true or fable, caused others to have eerie reactions. ~ John F. Montagne

Epidermal Macabre
Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes,-
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost. ~ Theodore Roethke

They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control: the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, widely fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult it's teeth. They seem to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds - cooled - and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. They danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit. ~ Toni Morrison

Poor kid
all she'd wanted to do was get her teeth fixed. ~ Tom Upton

I try to offset any tendency towards the macabre with humour. As I see it, this is a typically English form of humour. It's a piece with such jokes as the one about the man who was being led to the gallows to be hanged. He looked at the trap door in the gallows, which was flimsily constructed, and he asked in some alarm, 'I say, is that thing safe? ~ Alfred Hitchcock

I guess you get all my money, I said. And I'm not even dead. I was trying for a joke, but it came out sounding macabre.
Hush, he said. He was still kneeling on the floor. You know I'll always take care of you.
I thought, already he's starting to patronize me. Then I thought, already you're starting to get paranoid. ~ Margaret Atwood

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Mrs Downs, a large sad lady who described herself, to Rupert's delight, as bulky but fragile, now came four mornings a week to clean the house. She was one of those people who habitually looked on the black side of everything with a cheerfulness that bordered upon the macabre. ~ Elizabeth Jane Howard

Despite the rigid classicism of the famous Paris Opera school and company, the French have done more than their share to unmoor la Danse from its traditions and standards. ~ Robert Gottlieb

This part of Warsaw has always been an extension of home for her, part of her shape, a responsive intimate part of her identity. So much she was attached to, so much that lent her footholding weight is now obliterated. It's as if one of the mirrors by which she recognises herself has ceased to reflect her. The teetering balancing act of unsupported walls makes her feel unsteady on her own legs. Buildings taken for granted are no longer standing. There are voids where previously history stood. Feathers like snowflakes rise up into the smoke infested air as if she is inside a macabre snow globe. ~ Glenn Haybittle

those ghouls who enter into a macabre dance with pot-bellied netas. ~ P.G. Tenzing

The bodies draped down through the leaves like rancid baubles in the locks of a horrible harlot. ~ Daniel Woodrell

My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself! ~ Paul Valery

Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willingly consume the terrors of the tomb...and find them to our liking. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Words are not enough. Not mine, cut off at the throat before they breathe. Never forming, broken and swallowed, tossed into the void before they are heard. It would be easy to follow, fall to my knees, prostrate before the deli counter. Sweep the shelves clear, scatter the tins, pound the cakes to powder. Supermarket isles stretching out in macabre displays. Christmas madness, sad songs and mistletoe, packed car parks, rotten leaves banked up in corners. Forgotten reminders of summer before the storm. Never trust a promise, they take prisoners and wishes never come true. Fairy stories can have grim endings and I don't know how I will face the world without you. ~ Peter B. Forster

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,
made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,
danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks. ~ Oscar Wilde

A trip to the hospital is always a descent into the macabre. I have never trusted a place with shiny floors. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Neither spoke, but lat silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.
At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock came so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.
The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house. ~ W.W. Jacobs

Owen is the most Hitchcockian preschooler I ever met. He's three. He knows maybe ninety word and one of them is 'crypt'? ~ Sarah Vowell

Like Lono's sword, he was both a symbol and a lethal tool; like the bayonet, his sole purpose was to be buried in the foeman's intestines; like all of his prior imagined reincarnations, his sole purpose was, like some macabre butterfly, to metamorphose into a killing machine, and die with sword in hand. ~ Christopher S.M. Lyon

That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Die in my nightmares; I will live in yours. ~ Aniket More

Every generation has a macabre notion that wars, government prohibition, natural disasters or mankind itself could be the downfall of society and the world as a whole. ~ Lauren DeStefano