Gothic Literature Quotes

would a madman have been so wise as this? ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I love the gothic literature. It always has such great stories with characters bigger than life and the stakes are always high. And because there's always a wolf at the door, the emotions are high; the romance, the sexuality, friendships, and relationships. You don't know if the guy kissing you one minute is going to bite you the next. This heightens all of the sensibilities and emotions, and therefore, it sings to me. And that's where the music comes from. ~ Frank Wildhorn

When the moon was high over the moors, Rhineholt became a dark place with long, lonely corridors whose shadows gave breath to many secrets. ~ Amber Newberry

In Gothic fiction, characters must contend with the dead, with active hauntings or with hallucinations of hauntings, as well as whatever other trying circumstances they might find themselves in: orphanhood, lunacy, imprisonment, inheritances that go astray, troubling romantic situations. The Gothic novel does not strive for subtlety, and it isn't to everyone's taste. It can seem adolescent, an immature version of the stately, measured, grown-up realist novel, except that the line between Gothic and the realist is never clear. A disdain for the Gothic is limiting, since this literature, in all its flagrancy, has something to say about emotional as well as physical death, and a tale of a haunting can have a narrative vitality that is far from conclusive. Gothic stories linger especially in the mind. ~ Brenda Walker

The castle is situated at the terminus of a long and upward-winding mountain road. It presents a somewhat forbidding aspect to the world, for there is little about it to suggest gaiety or warmth or any of those qualities that might assure a wayfarer of welcome. Rather, this vast edifice of stone exudes an austerity, cold and repellent, a hint of ancient mysteries long buried, an effluvium of medieval dankness and decay. At night, and most particularly on nights when the moon is slim or cloud-enshrouded, it is a heavy blot upon the horizon, a shadow only, without feature save for its many-turreted outline; and should the moon be temporarily released from her cloudy confinement, her fugitive rays lend scant comfort, for they but serve to throw the castle into sudden, startling chiaroscuro, its windows fleetingly assuming the appearance of sightless though all-seeing orbs, its portcullis becoming for an instant a gaping mouth, its entire form striking the physical and the mental eye as would the sight of a giant skull. ~ Ray Russell

Sexual desire is only the frustrated desire to eat human flesh. ~ Christopher Frayling

Scar tissue does more than flaunt its strength by chronicling the assaults it has withstood. Scar tissue is new growth. And it is tougher than skin innocent of the blade. ~ Shelley Jackson

Poetry and visions, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdy
common sense of a burgher-class in the making. ~ Hope Mirrlees

You see the world in colors,
I see in Black and Red. ~ Irum Zahra

At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there. ~ Angela Carter

There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock. ~ Angela Carter

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game. I think that you ought not to approach literature without a moral responsibility for every word you write. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not. ~ Thomas Pynchon

The modern mind ... is interested above all in subtleties, equivocations and the subterranean complexities which dominate the average man and compose his life ... modern literature is concerned with the twilight, the passive rather than the active mind ... those undercurrents which flow beneath the apparently firm surface.
(Joyce to Arthur Power) ~ James Joyce

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary ~ Salman Rushdie

In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction. ~ Audre Lorde

If circumstances should make it impossible (temporarily, I hope) for me to be a Russian writer, perhaps I shall be able, like the Pole Joseph Conrad, to become for a time an English writer ... ("Letter To Stalin") ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect. ~ Oscar Wilde

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics. ~ Richard Dawkins

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading. ~ Leslie Jamison

The apostles were scattered, and even the leaders of the Church in Jerusalem had neither the power nor the means to impose uniformity.In these circumstances, we must imagine the literature of Christianity as spreading gradually, irregularly, and in a manner which variations inevitable. ~ Frederic G. Kenyon

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I would much rather read a book about Ty Cobb, who was quite possibly a sociopath. It makes for more interesting copy. Some of the most memorable characters in literature were villains. ~ Jonathan Weeks

Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write. ~ Nicholas Sparks

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me. ~ Zadie Smith

When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he's doing nothing but the dog is barking, call 911. ~ Erma Bombeck

One of the first lessons that I hope you grasp is that woven into meaningful literature, so tightly that it can't be separated, is a telling lesson, even in stories as short as this one."
"Always?" I ask.
"Always!" she confirms. "Good stories teach! ~ Camron Wright

Praise be to God, Who has so disposed matters that pleasant literary anecdotes may serve as an instrument for the polishing of wits and the cleansing of rust from our hearts. ~ Ahmad Al-Tifashi

Prison, illness, abuse, drugs, abandonment, deportation: all traumas have their literature. But this crucial and fundamental trauma -- the very definition of femininity, "the body that can be taken by force and must remain defenseless" -- was not part of literature. Not a single woman who has been through the process of rape has taken to words to craft a novel out of her experience. No guide, no companionship. Rape wasn't allowed into the symbolic realm. ~ Virginie Despentes

The man who knows it can't be done counts the risk, not the reward. ~ Elbert Hubbard

Countries which are governed by the dabblers will undoubtedly turn into the miserable countries! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

It is beautiful to express love and even more beautiful to feel it. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

A spy novel?" Dagmar asked. "You two are talking about a spy novel?"
Annwyl threw her hands up in the air. "Not just a spy novel!"
"It's much more than that," Ragnar argued, and when Dagmar gawked at him in disgust, he added, "I can't read deep, meaningful, thought-provoking philosophy all the time."
"Exactly. Sometimes you have to read about a completely amoral hero whoring and killing his way across an unnamed land in the name of the queen that he'll always love - "
" - but never have." Then both Ragnar and Annwyl sighed a little. ~ G.A. Aiken

I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic. ~ Rabih Alameddine

Literature is a place for generosity and affection and hunger for equals - not a prizefight ring. We are increased, confirmed in our medium, roused to do our best, by every good writer, every fine achievement. Would we want one good writer or fine book less? The sense of writers being pitted against each other is bred primarily by the workings of the commercial marketplace, and by critics lauding one writer at the expense of another while ignoring the existence of nearly all. ~ Tillie Olsen

...After you have done everything to please a man and he's taken his pleasure with you, all you are for him is a whore, and a whore's daughter. ~ Pierre Louis

Once the government can demand of a publisher the names of the purchasers of his publications, the free press as we know it disappears. Then the spectre of a government agent will look over the shoulder of everyone who reads. The purchase of a book or pamphlet today may result in a subpoena tomorrow. Fear of criticism goes with every person into the bookstall. The subtle, imponderable pressures of the orthodox lay hold. Some will fear to read what is unpopular, what the powers-that-be dislike. When the light of publicity may reach any student, any teacher, inquiry will be discouraged. The books and pamphlets that are critical of the administration, that preach an unpopular policy in domestic or foreign affairs, that are in disrepute in the orthodox school of thought will be suspect and subject to investigation. The press and its readers will pay a heavy price in harassment. But that will be minor in comparison with the menace of the shadow which government will cast over literature that does not follow the dominant party line. If the lady from Toledo can be required to disclose what she read yesterday and what she will read tomorrow, fear will take the place of freedom in the libraries, book stores, and homes of the land. Through the harassment of hearings, investigations, reports, and subpoenas government will hold a club over speech and over the press."

[United States v. Rumely, 345 U.S. 41 (1953)] ~ William O. Douglas

Lady Ligeia," he began again, "is a woman in the literature who returns from the dead, taking over another woman's body to be with her true love."
"Oh, yes. Lovely" Isobel blanched. "I guess the other chick didn't mind at all? ~ Kelly Creagh

Western music in the Middle Ages was performed in these stone-walled gothic cathedrals, and in architecturally similar monasteries and cloisters. ~ David Byrne

Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon! ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Books have been vastly important in my life - as both a reader and a writer. I've learned that the great gift of literature is that someone else's tale becomes a chapter of your story. And I still feel books are the best art form for making contact with another consciousness, which is why reading a good book by yourself never feels lonely. ~ Bob Smith

Now that's a ghastly moon, not ghostly. ~ Anthea Carson

The next time you feel yourself giving in to the sometimes overwhelming urge to panic about the fate of literature in the digital age, follow this simple remedy: remember that you dream. For that is ironclad proof ... that literature - that narrative art in whatever form - will never die. Humans, strange creatures that we are, make sense of our lives by telling stories. In the space between each day and the next, we refresh our minds by concocting the most fantastic and elaborate fictions. We spend roughly a third of our lives thus, re-arranging our scattered experiences into stories. That we do it at all is bizarre and inexplicable. But as long as we do it, we will crave stories - human stories, stories that speak to us - in our waking life. The Internet, powerful as it is, cannot change that. ~ Adam Hammond

At age fifteen, Martin entered Morehouse College in an accelerated program during World War II. As the U.S. pledged to fight fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism, King was profoundly influenced through courses in sociology, history, philosophy, literature, and religion. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here is another marvy glimpse into the gothic basement that I call my mind. ~ Louise Rennison

It is impossible to talk of respect for students for the dignity that is in the process of coming to be, for the identities that are in the process of construction, without taking into consideration the conditions in which they are living and the importance of the knowledge derived from life experience, which they bring with them to school. I can in no way underestimate such knowledge. Or what is worse, ridicule it. ~ Paulo Freire

You stand for what is right-
for the patient and the staff.
Pressures of work may down you,
maybe bent but not broken. ~ Mujel Hasan

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. ~ Italo Calvino

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter? ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Nonfiction is a form of literature that lies halfway between fiction and fact. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald