Gothic Dualism Quotes

It must be obvious that in the high Middle Ages there was no possibility of the sort of naturalism which reduces the whole of reality to a mere sum of sense impressions any more than of a total replacement of feudal forms of rule by the bourgeois manner of life, nor again of any radical abolition of the spiritual dictatorship of the Church for a free and untrammelled secular culture. In art, as in all other fields of culture, what we find is just a certain balance between freedom and restraint. Gothic naturalism is an unstable equilibrium of world-affirming and world-denying impulses, just as the whole of chivalry is permeated by an inner contradiction, and just as the whole religious life of the period fluctuates between dogma and inwardness, between clerical creeds and lay piety, between orthodoxy and subjectivism. The same inner contradiction, the same spiritual polarity, manifests itself in all these social, religious and artistic oppositions. ~ Arnold Hauser

Is it possible for one to enter sleep and wander while never waking? And if so, for how long can one survive this way? ~ Tiffany Apan

... where purl with ravishing music the scented waters that come from the grotto-born river Narg. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

The spirit is the cause of all our thoughts and body-action, and everything, but it is untouched by good or evil, pleasure or pain, heat of cold, and all the dualism of nature, although it lends its light to everything. ~ Swami Vivekananda

I can see how your mother would have a point. Having a debate with a politically minded woman can be intriguing and even entertaining but to share a house with her and have her always campaigning and protesting at the dinner table," he slanted his gaze down toward me. "That could be very tiring indeed. ~ Gwenn Wright

He breathed in hard. The stench of blood filled his lungs. Only now, for the first time, could he truly appreciate it. ~ Shane K.P. O'Neill

Another persistent problem is that the Gothic ornament can become a maintenance nightmare. The cracks, joints, and attachments are a magnet for ivy, nesting animals, and moisture. It is rare indeed to see a Gothic structure more than a few decades old that doesn't have some sort of ongoing structural maintenance problems. ~ Douglas Keister

I am a sleeper, a spy, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not a misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, though some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

In less than seven years the vestiges of the Gothic invasion were almost obliterated, and the city appeared to resume its former splendour and tranquillity. The venerable matron replaced her crown of laurel, which had been ruffled by the storms of war, and was still amused in the last moment of her decay with the prophecies of revenge, of victory, and of eternal dominion. ~ Edward Gibbon

Listen,
listen with your eyes,
and your lips.
Listen with your skin,
and your blood.
Can you hear us,
at the edges? ~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

From communism to capitalism - from judaism to buddhism - from non-dualism to existentialism - people across time and geography have come together, to think, feel and behave as the collective - and they continue to do so. But the point is, this collective behavior, which we can most aptly call "bee-hive behavior", has been a two-edged sword - it has brought along breathtaking accomplishments for the species, but at the same time, it has caused heart-wrenching devastations. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Jane sneezed three hundred dollars' worth of coke into the air.

Krishna's black eyes seem to have mirrors in them. She glances at me with a smile as big as the Cheshire Cat's. ~ Anthea Carson

I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there. I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy-tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity. Anyway, I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in the darkening summer grass until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then. ~ Richard Brautigan

Man preys on man; and you mourn for the idle tapestry that decorated a gothic pillar, and the dronish bell that summoned the fat priest to prayer. You mourn for the empty pageant of a name, when slavery flaps her wing, ... Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave? - Hell stalks abroad; - the lash resounds on the slave's naked sides; and the sick wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremitting labour, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good night. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

How did you get in?"
He glowered at me and blushed in the early light. "It's - it's unimportant."
"Sebastian."
"Hmm?"
"Please, please tell me you didn't scale the walls and climb in through my window."
He glared harder.
"If you don't wish me to think of you as some kind of tragic Gothic figure, you really must stop acting like one. ~ Tarun Shanker

If you look at Gothic detailing right down to the bottom of a column or the capital of a column, it's a small version of the whole building; that's why, like dating the backbones of a dinosaur, a good historian can look at a detail of a Gothic building and tell you exactly what the rest of the building was, and infer the whole from the parts. ~ Charles Jencks

Melrose is the finest remaining specimen of Gothic architecture in Scotland. Some of the sculptured flowers in the cloister arches are remarkably beautiful and delicate, and the two windows - the south and east oriels - are of a lightness and grace of execution really surprising. ~ Bayard Taylor

As he sat up, he heard soft dripping sounds from the bathroom, little plips like water slipping over the edges of the tub and into the floor. The hairs on the back of his neck rose as he realized where he‟d last heard that sound. His muscles tight with strain from his earlier exertions, he stood and walked warily toward the half open bathroom door and the tub beyond it. Slipping quietly past the door, he saw that the curtain was drawn, and again the shadowed figure lay behind it. One long, slim, leg dangled from the end of the tub, beads of water gliding down its length and off the polished toes. At the other end he saw a mass of auburn curls, matted deep red near the porcelain of the tub. It was the dream and the vision again, more real now, too strong to deny. Shaking, he moved toward the curtain, gagging on the sickly smell of rust and roses, feeling the thin nylon glide between thumb and palm as he pulled it back to reveal his darkest nightmare and deepest regret. He could see the crimson water now, blood bubbles gliding over its surface and clinging to the legs dangling over the tub‟s edge. When he‟d pulled the curtain completely away from the tub and around to its opposite side, he saw her face. Her eyes were closed and he saw that her lids were bruised and purple against the translucent paleness of her face, drained completely dead white under the makeup she‟d brushed on before she‟d died. Staggering by the sight of her, he knelt by the tub and extended one shaking han ~ Amanda M. Lyons

To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us. The ~ Mark Fisher

it looks dualistic, but it has that ability to liberate you from the bondage of dualism. ~ Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

My ghost is the only soul who ever comes to cry on my grave ... Only the skies cried sincerely on my funeral. ~ Simona Panova

Tunstell was not what one could describe as call subtle. His flaming red hair bobbed up with each pointed and articulated footstep as though he were some cloaked Gothic villain creeping across a stage. ~ Gail Carriger

Lucy absently thanked him and at once began to consider which among her gowns would be best suited for a midnight adventure to a gothic castle. ~ David Liss

Hello, my name is Holly Eryngo Nemov. My last name is pronounced like 'Nemo', and if you spell 'Nemo' backwards, it becomes 'omen'. 'Nemov' is also an anagram for 'venom'. It also means 'nobody'. My family thought it was a good last name for me. I am fifteen years old – I'll be sixteen after October the 31st – and I'm a necromancer's apprentice. Necromancy, from the Greek words 'nekros' and 'manteia', means 'divination from the dead'. My family prayed to a demon prince a long time ago, to bring me back from that realm of the world, so I used to believe that they wanted me, but they didn't. I like reading, I like practicing magic, I like catching rattlesnakes and I like quiet, isolated places. I don't like dogs, riverbanks, big cities or survival. My family is dead, and I'm supposed to have joined the thing that killed them. ~ Rebecca McNutt

Now that Janet and Frances were older, Grandpa would let them visit him in his study, where the parrot lived. Grandpa came from a long line of parrot-keeping men, and Polly's predecessor, a white cockatoo, had fought with Wellington's armies in the Napoleonic Wars. Janet's father's earliest memories were of the astonishing oaths known to this bird, who was then a hundred and two years old and spoke in ripe gamey accents long since gone from the world of men. Grandpa believed that there must be a fair number of such long-lived birds in Scotland - even perhaps in England - and it would have been a fine thing to have them all gathered in a great dining hall, invoking ghostly midshipmen and dragoons, violent drinkers and merry rhymesters, perhaps even occasionally a lady of refinement. This, he said, would afford a historical experience of rare value; indeed, ancient parrots should be fêted and cultivated as true archivists. ~ Elspeth Barker

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads. ~ George Santayana

Laying here in my grave..at last.. I am finally alone. ~ Grandaddy BAD

The pine trees were rows of knife-blades whispering: "Fall upon us!" and in the gathering darkness the torrent roared and howled, beating against its rocking prison walls with the frenzy of an everlasting despair.
"Padre!" Arthur rose, shuddering, and drew back from the precipice. "It is like hell."
"No, my son," Montanelli answered softly, "it is only like a human soul. ~ Ethel Lilian Voynich

I'm not really into gothic music, it's not really my type of scene but each to their own. I listen to pretty much anything. ~ Richard Fleeshman

All cats are gray in the dark. And besides, her actions have less to do with her, and everything to do with you. ~ Jaye Frances

Science has its place in man's search for understanding, but science and the imagination have tended to bifurcate in the modern world; only the true poetic intellect can end this long-established dualism. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history. ~ Russell Lynes

Not without deep pain do we admit to ourselves that the artists of all ages have in their highest flights carried to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions that we now recognize as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of humanity, and they could not have done this without their belief in the absolute truth of these errors. Now if the belief in such truth generally diminishes, if the rainbow colors at the outermost ends of human knowing and imagining fade: then the species of art that, like the Divina commedia, Raphael's pictures, Michelangelo's frescoes, the Gothic cathedrals, presupposes not only a cosmic, but also a metaphysical significance for art objects can never blossom again. A touching tale will come of this, that there was once such an art, such belief by artists. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

it seems to me that, on balance, soul/body dualism has been the enemy of compassion. For instance, the moral stigma that still surrounds disorders of mood and cognition seems largely the result of viewing the mind as distinct from the brain. When the pancreas fails to produce insulin, there is no shame in taking synthetic insulin to compensate for its lost function. ~ Sam Harris

Is this it? Johann wondered. The longer fall I was looking for? To know that I was summoned up from the dark ether to do a monster's deeds for Hallandrette's truest son? And when our work is done, I will carry him to the bottom of the sea, where we both belong. Deep beneath the silt our bones will turn to salt. ~ Jennifer Giesbrecht

It was not exactly a longing to stay here, for Trepassen was too gothic and gloomy to ever feel like a truly welcoming place. It had the sense of a house where people had suffered in silence, where meals had been eaten in tension and fear, where secrets had been concealed, and where unhappiness had reigned more often than contentment. ~ Ruth Ware

The Release

In those last moments before
the platter of salt and dirt
lay on his stomach, wax-light
had waved across a mute heart,
his son waited by the bed.
Raised to believe the soul left
the body with its last breath,
he listened for death's rattle,
then pressed his lips like a kiss
to his father's lips, and took
into his mouth the breath that
had given him breath, a life
distilled to one stir of air
soft as moth wings against palms,
held a moment, then let go. ~ Ron Rash

Dead tree branches rattled,
the cold wind seethed, it prattled
of abominations about to unfold.
A lone wolf howled,
the full moon it prowled,
ready for evils untold. ~ A. Lee Brock

...Leaning on her maid, she stole through the winding galleries, and lightly descending the stairs, entered the long hall, which terminated in a dark arched passage that opened into the chapel. This was a wild and gloomy structure: beneath it were the vaults which contained the ancestors of the earl of Dunreath, whose deeds and titles were enumerated on gothic monuments: their dust-covered banners waving around in sullen dignity to the rude gale, which found admittance through the broken windows. The light which the maid held produced deep shadows, that heightened the solemnity of the place. ~ Regina Maria Roche

Or do you like being frightened?"

Hugh, though generally intelligent, is dense in certain ways; this is one of them.

"Why, of course, I like being frightened," I said. "I want to be made to creep and creep and creep. Fear is the most absorbing and luxurious of emotions. One forgets all else if one is afraid. ~ E.F. Benson

The questions push me further into the space in between, the place where my madness lays waiting for me. I struggle with each question, determined to extract some sort of answer, an explanation for everything that has happened so far. But no answers come and I'm forced to acknowledge the feeling lodged between my two worlds
Terror. ~ Christine Fonseca

It was late in Ruana and Ray's visit when Samuel
started talking about the gothic revival house that Lindsey
and he had found along an overgrown section of Route 30. As
he told Abigail about it in detail, describing how he had
realized he wanted to propose to Lindsey and live there with
her, Ray found himself asking, "Does it have a big hole in
the ceiling of the back room and cool windows above the
front door?"
"Yes," Samuel said, as my father grew alarmed. "But it
can be fixed, Mr. Salmon. I'm sure of it."
"Ruth's dad owns that," Ray said.
Everyone was quiet for a moment and then Ray continued.
"He took out a loan on his business to buy up old
places that aren't already slated for destruction. He wants
to restore them," Ray said.
"My God," Samuel said.
And I was gone.
(Susie finnally giving up on earth and moving on) ~ Alice Sebold

These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don't have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks. ~ Jimmy Buffett

I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'? ~ Margaret Atwood

I like to spoof the original Gothic classics, so there is also good dose of comedy in the 'Parasol Protectorate' - giggling readers are good. ~ Gail Carriger

I look out past the corn and the wheat and wonder how many sets of bones are buried, unspoken, keeping their stories to themselves in the dirt. I wonder if they know the sky is bright blue today and the air smells sweet. I wonder if they still listen in. ~ Andrea Portes

Included in the Presqueville is the Cathedrale St.-Jean, a church built during medieval times, including both Romanesque and Gothic styles; its nave, with its flying buttresses flinging out their support as the walls sweep toward the heavens ~ Jane Thompson

If dualism is true, then life after death is not only possible, but plausible. That's because our immaterial minds are distinct from our material bodies, and the mortal fate of our bodies in no way implies the death of our minds. Even more than this, the death of the body becomes a kind of emancipation for the mind, because during life our minds are inextricably bound to our bodies. Think of a vapor or gas that is sealed inside a bottle. Smash the bottle and you haven't smashed the vapor; you have released it. The fate of the vapor is not tied to the fate of the bottle as long as vapors and bottles are different kinds of stuff. Both Plato and Descartes advanced arguments along these lines for the immortality of the soul, ~ Anonymous

It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection. ~ Mircea Eliade