Gothic Romancec Quotes

I believe in a world where love can still catch you off guard and where the best part is the falling stage. Those shy glances, the racing heart, flushed cheeks, and the butterflies? That's magic.
~Sarah Brocious on More Than Scars ~ Sarah Brocious

These streets belong to us because we decided not to punch the time clock. We decided to see what and f*ck is going on out here when all those other people are going to sleep. So we walk from dusk until dawn and we rule. ~ Keith Kekic

I cannot ever imagine a time or place in which I will not love you. I am willing to do whatever it takes. ~ Laura Morgan

In starlit nights I saw you,
So cruelly you kissed me.
Your lips a magic world,
Your sky all hung with jewels.
The killing moon
Will come too soon.

- The Killing Moon ~ Echo And The Bunnymen

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

Must beauty blossom, rooted in decay,
And night devour its flaming hues alway? ~ Clark Ashton Smith

Jenks's gaze was even and calm, wise and even a bit sad. The wind ruffled his hair, and the sound of the pixies grew obvious.
"No," he said. "I don't think you do."
I glared, and he added, "I think it would kill you quicker than going to see Piscary wearing gothic lace. I think managing to find a blood balance with Ivy is going to be the only way you're going to survive. Besides ... " He grinned impishly. " ... no one but Ivy will put up with the things you need or the crap you dish out. ~ Kim Harrison

There's a certain deeper sort of beauty in the bleak. I see it that bleak is beautiful in part because it is too deathly and grim to fathom itself so. ~ Criss Jami

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

I am drawn to Americana, and I am drawn to gothic stories, and I love American gothic stories. ~ Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

The Silmarils are Eorclanstánas (also treated as an Old English noun with plural Silmarillas). There are several different forms of this Old English word: eorclan-, eorcnan-, and eorcan- from which is derived the 'Arkenstone' of the Lonely Mountain. The first element may be related to Gothic airkns, 'holy'. With middangeard line 37 cf. my father's note in Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings, in A Tolkien Compass, p. 189: 'The sense is 'the inhabited lands of (Elves and) Men', envisaged as lying between the Western Sea and that of the Far East (only known in the West by rumour). Middle-Earth is a modern alteration of medieval middel-erde from Old English middan-geard'. ~ Christopher Tolkien

I liked the darkness, the dusty bay window, the view over the grey, muddy harbour and the towering cliffs beyond. How could I think of all that and dislike it, really, when in every nook and cranny I felt Peter's eyes peering out, watching me? ~ Ava Bloomfield

She lifted my head up with her woundless hands and smiled. Her smile could make the day last a lifetime. I wanted to kiss her. She placed her hand on my heart. I tried to pull her close to me but I knew my life was coming to an end. It would be meaningless. Why would anyone care for a monster that I am? ~ S.K. Cunningham

Horace, however, had arrayed himself in a Gothic assortment of crushed velvet, black satin, and patent leather that shouldn't have been allowed in my view. He might as well have I AM A VAMPIRE embroidered across the front of his watered-silk waistcoat. An outfit like that is going to get him staked one of these days; it's exactly what Boris Karloff would have worn, if he had joined the cast of Rocky Horror Motion Picture Show. ~ Catherine Jinks

The original Gothic horror tales focused on personalities deformed through loneliness. Ghouls, vampires, werewolves: all made, not born. But the isolation? Are even such as these ever truly alone? Perhaps the psyche has always been more complex than that, desire eternally more potent than terror. Surely, none prowl entirely in solitude. ~ Robert Dunbar

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

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

(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood. ~ Andre Breton

I am a solitary wave in the dark and desolate sea: and the sparkling glass I drank was drugged with misery. ~ Adelbert Von Chamisso

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

He stood at the foot of the grave, gloved hands clasped behind him, his dark clothes and hair blending into one black silhouette, as if he were not a presence but an absence, a hole cut out of the landscape. ~ Amanda DeWees

I lie more convincingly than I tell the truth. ~ Simona Panova

Can you look at this brilliant wound? ~ Keishi Ando

But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like. ~ Minoru Yamasaki

Out west everything has its own space. Every little ramshackle cabin, shack, hut sits perched atop its own little piece of destiny with room to breathe, room to live, room to die. You'll see them, the dead ones, sitting by the side of the road like some faded gray and rotting mystery, thinking about the good ol days before trains and cars and wanting more. ~ Andrea Portes

I have learned one lesson in all this and I will share it knowing it will do no one any good. The lesson is this: "There are none more complicit in one's undoing than one's own heart". ~ James Pratt

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

Recently, I've discovered Radiohead and find them to be quite good. So clearly, I'm some kind of musical retard. (Jonathan Ames, Middle-American Gothic) ~ Dave Eggers

The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century - or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet. ~ Laini Taylor

And his soul plunged downward, drowning in that deep pit: he felt that could never again escape from this smothering flood of pain and ugliness, from the eclipsing horror and pity of it all. And as he walked, he twisted his own neck about, and beat the air with his arm like a wing, as if he had received a blow in his kidneys. He felt that he might be clean and free if he could only escape into a single burning passion -- hard, and hot, and glittering -- of love, hatred, terror, or disgust. But he was caught, he was strangling, in the web of futility. ~ Thomas Wolfe

You don't need a sad soul
to feel the beauty of a dead grave
Just stay with the pale moon
when darkness wants the night to be brave ~ Munia Khan

One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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

This is not written for the young or the light of heart, not for the tranquil species of men whose souls are content with the simple pleasures of family, church, or profession. Rather, I write to those beings like myself whose existence is compounded by a lurid intermingling of the dark and the
light; who can judge rationally and think with reason, yet who feel too keenly and churn with too great a passion; who have an incessant longing for happiness and yet are
shadowed by a deep and persistent melancholy - those who grasp gratification where they may, but find no lasting comfort for the soul. ~ B.E. Scully

The feeling was FEAR, she realized... but it was a new type of fear; more sincere than the jitters she felt when it rained and not as piercing as the terror of crashing cars. This fear was darker somehow... mysterious... curious like the retracted paws of an alley cat. ~ Jake Vander-Ark

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

THE BARROW

In this high field strewn with stones
I walk by a green mound,
Its edges sheared by the plough.
Crumbs of animal bone
Lie smashed and scattered round
Under the clover leaves
And slivers of flint seem to grow
Like white leaves among green.
In the wind, the chestnut heaves
Where a man's grave has been.

Whatever the barrow held
Once, has been taken away:
A hollow of nettles and dock
Lies at the centre, filled
With rain from a sky so grey
It reflects nothing at all.
I poke in the crumbled rock
For something they left behind
But after that funeral
There is nothing at all to find.

On the map in front of me
The gothic letters pick out
Dozens of tombs like this,
Breached, plundered, left empty,
No fragments littered about
Of a dead and buried race
In the margins of histories.
No fragments: these splintered bones
Construct no human face,
These stones are simply stones.

In museums their urns lie
Behind glass, and their shaped flints
Are labelled like butterflies.
All that they did was die,
And all that has happened since
Means nothing to this place.
Above long clouds, the skies
Turn to a brilliant red
And show in the water's face
One living, and not these dead."

- Anthony Thwaite, from The Owl In The Tree ~ Anthony Thwaite

An elliptical machine does not excite me as much as a Gothic novel and a chicken chimichanga. ~ Leah Marie Brown

What the world needs right now ... a good, artistic, gothic, terrifying scare ~ Iggy Pop

If your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. ~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Some rumors said she was a demon from another world. Other rumors said she was death incarnate, someone to remind us of our misdeeds. But no one had said how beautiful she was. No one had mentioned her eyes. The ones that showed color only for a second. A hint of beauty in absolute blackness. ~ Shannon A. Thompson

In the 16th century,parks and gardens were models of the cosmos and also tools for altering one's consciousness, possibly for changing one's destiny. ~ Linda Lappin