Castles Crumbling Quotes

You’re the mountain I build my castle on, brick by brick,” she whispered to him, her eyes stinging. “You stand, I soar. You crack, I crumble.

Inside her, great castles of comprehension, models of the world as she had understood it, shivered. She could not decide whether to let them crumble or to try desperately to save them.

They were viewed very much like castles, I suppose: as crumbling, obsolete relics, with no real modern function other than as tourist attractions. But when the skies darkened and the nation called, both reawoke to the meaning of their existence. One shielded our bodies, the other, our souls.

Fairy godmother says without you here, the moon & the stars would fall. Mountains would crack down the middle. Castles would crumble into nothingness. Books would burst into flames. It's not time to go just yet.

The Children's Hour Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower, Comes a pause in the day's occupations, That is known as the Children's Hour. I hear in the chamber above me The patter of little feet, The sound of a door that is opened, And voices soft and sweet. From my study I see in the lamplight, Descending the broad hall stair, Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, And Edith with golden hair. A whisper, and then a silence: Yet I know by their merry eyes They are plotting and planning together To take me by surprise. A sudden rush from the stairway, A sudden raid from the hall! By three doors left unguarded They enter my castle wall! They climb up into my turret O'er the arms and back of my chair; If I try to escape, they surround me; They seem to be everywhere. They almost devour me with kisses, Their arms about me entwine, Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine! Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti, Because you have scaled the wall, Such an old mustache as I am Is not a match for you all! I have you fast in my fortress, And will not let you depart, But put you down into the dungeon In the round-tower of my heart. And there will I keep you forever, Yes, forever and a day, Till the walls shall crumble to ruin, And moulder in dust away!

A guard spoke. “Stop, both of you! You may not enter the castle with weapons.” Tenzin drew her sword in the space of a heartbeat, sliced off the head of the guard who spoke, and kept walking as the body crumbled to the ground. “Oh, really?

His-his-history!’ he cried. ‘I declare the Stone Age at an end. History will start from tomorrow!

Murtaugh Allsbrook and his riders spread the news like wildfire. Down every road, over every river, to the north and south and west, through snow and rain and mist, their hooves churning up the dust of each kingdom. And for every town they told, every tavern and secret meeting, more riders went out. More and more, until there was not a road they had not covered, until there was not one soul who did not know that Aelin Galathynius was alive—and willing to stand against Adarlan. Across the White Fangs and the Ruhnns, all the way to the Western Wastes and the red-haired queen who ruled from a crumbling castle. To the Deserted Peninsula and the oasis-fortress of the Silent Assassins. Hooves, hooves, hooves, echoing through the continent, sparking against the cobblestones, all the way to Banjali and the river-front palace of the King and Queen of Eyllwe, still in their midnight mourning clothes. Hold on, the riders told the world. Hold on.

The crumbling castle, looming among the mists, exhaled the season, and every cold stone breathed it out. The tortured trees by the dark lake burned and dripped, their leaves snatched by the wind were whirled in wild circles through the towers. The clouds mouldered as they lay coiled, or shifted themselves uneasily upon the stone skyfield, sending up wreathes that drifted through the turrets and swarmed up hidden walls.

He expected pages and pages of bright pictures of pancakes of every variety shown in plain stacks, or built into castles or bridges or igloos, or shaped like airplanes or rowboats or fire engines. And pitchers of syrup to choose from -- partridge berry syrup, thimbleberry syrup, huckleberry syrup, bosenberry syrup, and raspberry syrup. Then there would be cheese plates and cheeses a la carte. Creamy cheeses, crumbly cheeses, and peculiar little cheeses in peculiar little clay pots.

There must be a Joke Monastery up here – and Joke Monks.’ He explained : ‘You see, they think the world was created as a joke, so everyone should give thanks by having a good laugh.

That was the thing neither Roja nor the señoras understood. Sometimes what a story needed was not a girl who would do what the prince told her, who would content herself with meeting him only in the dark, who would not question why she must not open her eyes. Sometimes a story needed the girl who would find him among the crumbling stones where he did pretending all o fit was a castle. It needed the girl who took the prince’s orders and crushed them between her back teeth, who bound his wrists if that was what it took to set him free.

I’m building my castle brick by brick in the middle of the storm, and I’m wondering if the mountain underneath my feet will crumble.” She turned her neck to catch his eyes. “You’re my mountain, my Vad. I don’t know how and I don’t understand why, but somehow, I’m building my castle on you.

I knew this girl was going to ruin me, but I think she is going to be my complete destruction. And I will happily let my castle crumble around me if it makes her happy.

The constructs of our relationships are like outdated crumbling castles. They need to be reinforced to withstand the rigors of evolvement so they can match the modern environment in which they find themselves.

My dark days made me strong. Or maybe I already was strong, and they made me prove it. Jonah Daniels has his own grief, but he doesn't understand what it feels like to waste away in a castle dungeon where you have been chained to crumbling walls. And, when the dragons close in, you only think: Good. Let this be over.

It looked like someone had been planting stars. The castle was in shreds, flagstone floors tiny islands in a sea of stones and wild grass, but clusters of lights were nestled on the castle floor and the earth of the cliffs alike, lanterns strung from the crumbling battlements. There were so many lights they cast a shimmering haze over everything, bathing the ruins in a pale glow. Mae walked, hardly aware that she was walking, through Tintagel Castle over stones washed in brightness

The young detective smiled, glad that everything had worked out so successfully. Her gaze wandered along the stately cloister of Heath Castle. With the afternoon sun sinking low, the shadowy passageway had never looked more beautiful. It was peaceful and quiet, and nothing was further from Nancy’s thoughts than a new mystery.

И най-малкият, вместо да е мил, добър и храбър, бил по-гаден и от някой, когото сигурно ще срещнеш само в месец, състоящ се изцяло от понеделници…

Dragons Invade The Crumbling Castle Area,’ shouted the first page (this was the headline), and then he said in an ordinary voice: ‘For full details hear Page Three.

Inside her, grand castles of comprehension, models of the world as she had understood it, shivered. She could not decide whether to let them crumble or to try desperately to save them.

The room became cinders. Kaltain pushed the chains off her as though they were cobwebs and arose. She disrobed as she walked out of the room. Let them see what had been done to her, the body they’d wasted. She made it two steps into the hall before they noticed her, and beheld the black flames rippling off her. Death, devourer of worlds. The hallway turned to black dust. She strode toward the chamber where the screaming was loudest, where female cries leaked through the iron door. The iron did not heat, did not bend to her magic. So she melted an archway through the stones. Monsters and witches and men and demons whirled. Kaltain flowed into the room, spreading her arms wide, and became shadowfire, became freedom and triumph, became a promise hissed in a dungeon beneath a glass castle: Punish them all. She burned the cradles. She burned the monsters within. She burned the men and their demon princes. And then she burned the witches, who looked at her with gratitude in their eyes and embraced the dark flame. Kaltain unleashed the last of her shadowfire, tipping her face to the ceiling, toward a sky she’d never see again. She took out every wall and every column. As she brought it all crashing and crumbling around them, Kaltain smiled, and at last burned herself into ash on a phantom wind.

Storm's coming! Huts and homes of the humble will thrive, while castles and palaces of thieves will crumble. Either we are explorers of equality and dignity, or we are crown worshipping animal.

and was built into the shape of a balcony at the top, with insecure, irregular battlements, crumbling as if drawn by an anxious or careless child as they stood out, zigzag fashion, against the blue sky.

Fall Song" Another year gone, leaving everywhere its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves, the uneaten fruits crumbling damply in the shadows, unmattering back from the particular island of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere except underfoot, moldering in that black subterranean castle of unobservable mysteries — roots and sealed seeds and the wanderings of water. This I try to remember when time's measure painfully chafes, for instance when autumn flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing to stay — how everything lives, shifting from one bright vision to another, forever in these momentary pastures.

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea-cosy. I can't say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring - I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn't a very good poem. I have decided my best poetry is so bad that I mustn't write any more of it. Drips from the roof are plopping into the water-butt by the back door. The view through the windows above the sink is excessively drear. Beyond the dank garden in the courtyard are the ruined walls on the edge of the moat. Beyond the moat, the boggy ploughed fields stretch to the leaden sky. I tell myself that all the rain we have had lately is good for nature, and that at any moment spring will surge on us. I try to see leaves on the trees and the courtyard filled with sunlight. Unfortunately, the more my mind's eye sees green and gold, the more drained of all colour does the twilight seem. It is comforting to look away from the windows and towards the kitchen fire, near which my sister Rose is ironing - though she obviously can't see properly, and it will be a pity if she scorches her only nightgown. (I have two, but one is minus its behind.) Rose looks particularly fetching by firelight because she is a pinkish person; her skin has a pink glow and her hair is pinkish gold, very light and feathery. Although I am rather used to her I know she is a beauty. She is nearly twenty-one and very bitter with life. I am seventeen, look younger, feel older. I am no beauty but I have a neatish face. I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic - two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud. I must admit that our home is an unreasonable place to live in. Yet I love it. The house itself was built in the time of Charles II, but it was grafted on to a fourteenth-century castle that had been damaged by Cromwell. The whole of our east wall was part of the castle; there are two round towers in it. The gatehouse is intact and a stretch of the old walls at their full height joins it to the house. And Belmotte Tower, all that remains of an even older castle, still stands on its mound close by. But I won't attempt to describe our peculiar home fully until I can see more time ahead of me than I do now. I am writing this journal partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel - I intend to capture all our characters and put in conversations. It ought to be good for my style to dash along without much thought, as up to now my stories have been very stiff and self-conscious. The only time father obliged me by reading one of them, he said I combined stateliness with a desperate effort to be funny. He told me to relax and let the words flow out of me.

12. They had spent a lot of time on the beach, as did everyone for miles around when the sun decided to shine. Theirs was no ordinary beach; it was a gorgeous swathe of golden sand, framed by granite cliffs upon which stood the crumbling walls of an ancient castle. There were caves to explore too, hidden in the cliffs. Children and adults alike would venture deep into them, discovering a dark world that belonged predominantly to birds and sea creatures.

Don't be so hard on yourself, as if you'd been trapped and sealed in amber. Since you passed away I've been following your trail, traced only with lost words. Recently I went looking for the castle and found it in Bohemia. You'd given orders for diligent restorers to renew its façades on all sides. They hadn't finished back then, they're still at it today, and they will be tomorrow. Because it crumbles, cracks appear, mold swells the plaster, withers its bright skin, on the weather side first. It comforts me, their toil, for I too loved you on all sides, in vain.

The final stages of grief. Dellarobia felt an entirely new form of panic as she watched her son love nature so expectantly, wondering if he might be racing toward a future like some complicated sand castle that was crumbling under the tide. She didn’t know how scientists bore such knowledge. People had to manage terrible truths.

Beneath the haunted castle lies the dungeon keep: the womb from whose darkness the ego first emerged, the tomb to which it knows it must return at last. Beneath the crumbling shell or paternal authority, lies the maternal blackness, imagined by the Gothic writer as a prison, as a torture chamber- from which the cries of the kidnapped anima cannot even be heard. The upper and the lower levels of the ruined castle or abbey represent the contradictory fears at the heart of Gothic terror: dread of the superego, whose splendid battlements have been battered but not quite cast down- and of the id, whose buried darkness abounds in dark visions no stormer of the castle had ever touched.

Anyone who enters the room affects it. Leaves an impression upon it even if it is unintentional. Quietly opening the door lets a soft draft rustle over the objects inside. A tree might topple. A doll might lose its hat. An entire building might crumble. An ill-placed step might crush the hardware store. A sleeve could catch on the top of a castle, sending a princess tumbling to the ground below. It is a fragile place.

Therefore, if we built splendid castles, and pictured beautiful scenes, among the fervid coals of the hearth around which we were clustering, and if all went to rack with the crumbling embers, and have never since arisen out of the ashes, let us take to ourselves no shame. In my own behalf, I rejoice that I could once think better of the world’s improvability than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime.

In the month that she had lived at Bray, Maggie had felt pockets of this-this slowing down of time, these reverberations into the past. In America, everything was replaceable; ld stuf was thrown away quickly and entirely to make way for the next thing. But in Ireland, the ruined castles that dotted the landscape, the crumbling stnes walls that crisscrossed long-held family fields, these all provided the sense that the past drifted, but did not disappear. It was all around you, like mist.

High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mound whose sides are wooded near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest, stands the old chateau of my ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for the proud house whose honoured line is older even than the moss-grown castle walls. These ancient turrets, stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses in all France. From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts, and even Kings had been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the footsteps of the invader.

After picking up the lamp, she went to Joyce, who was clutching her injured shoulder. I should leave you here, she thought. She was unaware she had said the words aloud until Joyce replied. "You can't let me die!" "You're not going to die." Disgusted, terrified, Sara removed her own petticoat, wadded it up, and pressed it firmly against the wound to staunch the blood. Joyce screamed like an enraged cat, her eyes slitted and demonic. Sara's ears rang from the piercing cry. "Be quiet, you bitch!" Sara snapped. "Not another sound!" Suddenly her entire body was filled with furious energy. She felt strong enough to push down a stone wall with her bare hands. She went to the crumbling entrance of the castle and saw that the hack driver was still waiting, craning his neck curiously. "You!" she shouted. "Come here right away, or you won't get a bloody shilling of what she promised!" She turned back to Joyce, her blue eyes blazing. "And you... give me back my necklace.

As a child, she was curious about the world beyond the sea, but in a vague, half-sketched way, as she was curious about a lot of things she read in books. London and Treasure Island and horses and dragons were all equally imagined to her. She thought she would probably see them one day, when she was old. In the meantime, the island was hers to explore, and it took up more time than she could ever imagine having. There were books to read, thousands of them in the castle library, and Rowan brought back more all the time. There were trees to climb, caves along the beach to get lost in, traces of the fair folk who had once lived on the island to find and bring home. There was work to be done: Food needed to be grown and harvested; the livable parts of the castle, the parts that weren't a crumbling ruin, needed to be combed for useful things when the tide went out. She was a half-wild thing of ink and grass and sea breezes, raised by books and rabbits and fairy lore, and that was all she cared to be.

At the end of the oak-lined avenue, the girls came to a weather-stained loggia of stone. Its four handsomely carved pillars rose to support a balcony over which vines trailed. Steps led to the upper part. After mounting to the balcony, Nancy and her friends obtained a fine view of the nearby gardens. They had been laid out in formal sections, each one bounded by a stone wall or an un-trimmed hedge. Here and there were small circular pools, now heavy with lichens and moss, and fountains with leaf-filled basins. Over the treetops, about half a mile away, the girls could see two stone towers. “That’s the castle,” said George. Amid the wild growth, Nancy spotted a bridge. “Let’s go that way,” she suggested, starting down from the balcony. In a few minutes the trio had crossed the rickety wooden span. Before them lay a slippery moss-grown path. “The Haunted Walk,” Nancy read aloud the name on a rustic sign. “Why not try another approach?” Bess said with a shiver. “This garden looks spooky enough without deliberately inviting a meeting with ghosts!” “Oh, come on!” Nancy laughed, taking her friend firmly by the arm. “It’s only a name. Besides, the walk may lead to something interesting.

America for Me ‘Tis fine to see the Old World, and travel up and down Among the famous palaces and cities of renown, To admire the crumbly castles and the statues of the kings,— But now I think I’ve had enough of antiquated things. So it’s home again, and home again, America for me! My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be, In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars, Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars. Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air; And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair; And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome; But when it comes to living there is no place like home. I like the German fir-woods, in green battalions drilled; I like the gardens of Versailles with flashing fountains filled; But, oh, to take your hand, my dear, and ramble for a day In the friendly western woodland where Nature has her way! I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack: The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back. But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free,— We love our land for what she is and what she is to be. Oh, it’s home again, and home again, America for me! I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea, To the blessed Land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars, Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars. Henry Van

Our fascination with the gothic peaks in times of anxiety, panic, and upheaval. The Victorian gothic revival of the 1890s was stoked by scientific, technological, and social change. Industrialization and urbanization sparked feelings of alienation. Darwin's theories of evolution and the changing roles of women fanned racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and colonialist fears of 'primitivism,' moral decay, and sexual depravity. In the nineteenth century, terror-inducing imagery had shifted away from crumbling castles to crime-infested cities, and fear of villains and ghosts was supplanted by a fear of madness and degeneration. In the twentieth century, we celebrated/mourned the death of authorship, of the grand narrative, of the self, 'going-one-better in eschatological eloquence,' as Jacques Derrida put it, 'the end of history...the end of subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse Now.' A few years into the new millennium, we were zombie hordes, stalking social media for brains. The gothic is the fucked-either-way-and-freaking-the-fuck-out school of artistic interpretation, the hysterical framework of doom. And this tension between horror as morality tale and horror as decadent spectacle is, I believe, what fueled the pandemic of tabloid stories about wayward starlets that raged throughout 2006 and 2007. Celebrity train wreck stories begin, conservatively, as cautionary tales. A young woman, unprotected or legally emancipated, has moved alone from the relatively sheltered and secluded condition of parent-managed child stardom (because who, nowadays, is more cut off from the world than a child star?) into a corrupt and dangerous world, where her beauty, fame, youth, fortune, and sexual allure are regarded with a charged, ambivalent awe. She is instantly besieged with dangers, and preyed upon by unscrupulous adults. Until they can be contained again, by marriage or paternal protection, she exists in a constant state of uncertainty and peril. The peril is created, of course, by the 'author' - the media outlets that shape the train wreck's life, again and again, into thrilling, chilling tales of suspense.

Murtaugh Allsbrook and his riders spread the news like wildfire. Down every road, over every river, to the north and south and west, through snow and rain and mist, their hooves churning up the dust of each kingdom. And for every town they told, every tavern and secret meeting, more riders went out. More and more, until there was not a road they had not covered, until there was not one soul who did not know that Aelin Galathynius was alive—and willing to stand against Adarlan. Across the White Fangs and the Ruhnns, all the way to the Western Wastes and the red-haired queen who ruled from a crumbling castle. To the Deserted Peninsula and the oasis-fortress of the Silent Assassins. Hooves, hooves, hooves, echoing through the continent, sparking against cobblestones, all the way to Banjali and the riverfront palace of the King and Queen of Eyllwe, still in their midnight mourning clothes. Hold on, the riders told the world. Hold on.

The next day, after Sunday church services, the three girls set out in Nancy’s car, carrying a picnic lunch. On the way Nancy explained the latest developments in the mystery. She added, “Nothing must drive us away from the castle grounds until we’ve investigated every nook and corner!” Soon the familiar ivy-covered front boundary wall loomed ahead. Nancy parked beneath a cool tunnel of overhanging trees. The car was well hidden. She and her friends got out and walked to the rusty gate and peered between the bars. The

He felt the woman he devoted half of his life to slipping through his fingers: the pain lying in his desire for her, but the truth lying in his inability to love her. Sooner or later their sand castle built on beaches of make believe would crumble, washed away by the hungering tide of time and all he could do was watch it vanish, watching her fade out to sea.

[...] It’s a Joke Wheel. There must be a Joke Monastery up here – and Joke Monks.’ He explained: ‘You see, they think the world was created as a joke, so everyone should give thanks by having a good laugh.[...]

Knowledge did not seem to bring her a clearer vision of Jim’s world, but to make the mystery greater. She could not believe that she was supposed to feel respect for the dreary senselessness of the art shows which his friends attended, of the novels they read, of the political magazines they discussed—the art shows, where she saw the kind of drawings she had seen chalked on any pavement of her childhood’s slums—the novels, that purported to prove the futility of science, industry, civilization and love, using language that her father would not have used in his drunkenest moments—the magazines, that propounded cowardly generalities, less clear and more stale than the sermons for which she had condemned the preacher of the slum mission as a mealy-mouthed old fraud. She could not believe that these things were the culture she had so reverently looked up to and so eagerly waited to discover. She felt as if she had climbed a mountain toward a jagged shape that had looked like a castle and had found it to be the crumbling ruin of a gutted warehouse.

You’re the mountain I build my castle on, brick by brick,’ she whispered to him, her eyes stinging. ‘You stand, I soar. You crack, I crumble.

Where does this lead?” I asked, untangling my hair from a low-hanging branch. “The ruins,” Ravyn answered. “The original castle. Or what’s left of it.” Piqued, the Nightmare’s interest spurred my steps, and I followed the Captain of the Destriers through a particularly dense thicket to a meadow beyond. My eyes widened as I took in the landscape—the dewy grass, the enormous trees, and the graveyard of stonework: the last remains of a crumbled castle, nestled in the mist.

We stalked carefully through the park in best paramilitary fashion, the lost patrol on its mission into the land of the B movie. To Deborah’s credit, she was very careful. She moved stealthily from one piece of cover to the next, frequently looking right to Chutsky and then left at me. It was getting harder to see her, since the sun had now definitely set, but at least that meant it was harder for them to see us, too—whoever them might turn out to be. We leapfrogged through the first part of the park like this, past the ancient souvenir stand, and then I came up to the first of the rides, an old merry-go-round. It had fallen off its spindle and lay there leaning to one side. It was battered and faded and somebody had chopped the heads off the horses and spray-painted the whole thing in Day-Glo green and orange, and it was one of the saddest things I had ever seen. I circled around it carefully, holding my gun ready, and peering behind everything large enough to hide a cannibal. At the far side of the merry-go-round I looked to my right. In the growing darkness I could barely make out Debs. She had moved up into the shadow of one of the large posts that held up the cable car line that ran from one side of the park to the other. I couldn’t see Chutsky at all; where he should have been there was a row of crumbling playhouses that fringed a go-kart track. I hoped he was there, being watchful and dangerous. If anything did jump out and yell boo at us, I wanted him ready with his assault rifle. But there was no sign of him, and even as I watched, Deborah began to move forward again, deeper into the dark park. A warm, light wind blew over me and I smelled the Miami night: a distant tang of salt on the edge of rotting vegetation and automobile exhaust. But even as I inhaled the familiar smell, I felt the hairs go up on the back of my neck and a soft whisper came up at me from the lowest dungeon of Castle Dexter, and a rustle of leather wings rattled softly on the ramparts. It was a very clear notice that something was not right here and this would be a great time to be somewhere else; I froze there by the headless horses, looking for whatever had set off the Passenger’s alarm. I saw and heard nothing. Deborah had vanished into the darkness and nothing moved anywhere, except a plastic shopping bag blowing by in the gentle wind. My stomach turned over, and for once it was not from hunger. My

There is a saying' said Milandra 'about a view of distant castles. My father would say that from afar, they all looked so imposing. It is only when you approach them that you will see the crumbling walls and realize that they are as all other castles, houses or even peasant's hovels.

Gothic is the genre of fear. Our fascination with it is almost always revived during times of instability and panic. In the wake of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade described the rise of the genre as 'the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded,' and literary critics in the late eighteenth century mocked the work of early gothic writers Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis by referring to it as 'the terrorist school' of writing. As Fred Botting writes in Gothic, his lucid introduction to the genre, it expresses our unresolved feelings about 'the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality' and yet is extremely concerned with issues of social disintegration and collapse. It's preoccupied with all that is immoral, fantastic, suspenseful, and sensational and yet prone to promoting middle-class values. It's interested in transgression, but it's ultimately more interested in restitution; it alludes to the past yet is carefully attuned to the present; it's designed to evoke excessive emotion, yet it's thoroughly ambivalent; it's the product of revolution and upheaval, yet it endeavors to contain their forces; it's terrifying, but pretty funny. And, importantly, the gothic always reflects the anxieties of its age in an appropriate package, so that by the nineteenth century, familiar tropes representing external threats like crumbling castles, aristocratic villains, and pesky ghosts had been swallowed and interiorized. In the nineteenth century, gothic horrors were more concerned with madness, disease, moral depravity, and decay than with evil aristocrats and depraved monks. Darwin's theories, the changing roles of women in society, and ethical issues raised by advances in science and technology haunted the Victorian gothic, and the repression of these fears returned again and again in the form of guilt, anxiety, and despair. 'Doubles, alter egos, mirrors, and animated representations of the disturbing parts of human identity became the stock devices,' Botting writes, 'signifying the alienation of the human subject from the culture and language in which s/he is located.' In the transition from modernity to post-modernity, the very idea of culture as something stable and real is challenged, and so postmodern gothic freaks itself out by dismantling modernist grand narratives and playing games. In the twentieth century, 'Gothic [was] everywhere and nowhere,' and 'narrative forms and devices spill[ed] over from worlds of fantasy and fiction into real and social spheres.

Dellarobia felt an entirely new form of panic as she watched her son love nature so expectantly, wondering if he might be racing toward a future like some complicated sand castle that was crumbling under the tide. She didn’t know how scientists bore such knowledge. People had to manage terrible truths.

You’re the mountain I build my castle on, brick by brick. You stand, I soar. You crack, I crumble.

I can think of no one who would have trouble understanding the plot of this novel,” Miss Hardcastle continued. “It is ever so predictable: crumbling castles, a mysterious figure in the night, and a romance continually thwarted by circumstance. The only question I have is whether or not I shall bother continuing to the conclusion, for it seems that I can now predict it. But is not that part of the charm of such a book? Though I can guess the ending, I yet worry about the heroine’s happiness.

know what it is to want something so badly, you feel like your cells aren’t properly bonded together without it. At any moment you might just crumble apart.

You’re the mountain I build my castle on, brick by brick. You stand, I soar. You crack, I crumble.

When my little world is falling apart and the dream castles of my ambitions and hopes crumble into ruins, can I honestly declare, “Surely—yes, surely—goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life”?

To describe the effect as ‘menacing’, was too melodramatic for her tastes, but there was something undeniably charged about it – secretive, even. It was the ghostly gums, she had decided, their smooth silver limbs like ladies’ naked bodies in the mist. There were eerie sites in England – the haunted cliffs and caves of Tintagel, the ruins of Ludlow Castle, Hadrian’s Wall, and Stonehenge – but their mysteriousness stemmed from their role in the human story, the crumbling vestiges of people from the past. In Australia, the strangeness came from the land itself. Its mystery and meaning existed outside language – or outside her own language, at any rate. It told its story in far more ancient ways and only to those who knew how to hear it.

It's a measuring look, as if she's trying to figure out which sand castle is likely to crumble first, so she can shove some more mud up against it.

Beyond King and Crumpet (Uncoronation Sonnet) There's not one but two UKs - one is United Kingdom, where animals worship a king, another is United Kin-dom, where humans live as kin. Storm's coming! Huts and homes of the humble will thrive, while castles and palaces of thieves will crumble. Either we are explorers of equality and dignity, or we are crown worshipping animal. Putting all kings and queens to bed, Citizens must come out and work the soil. Enough chasing the parade of dead meat, March your own parade, tackling turmoil! Crown, cross and rigid constitution, Mindlessness has taken many a form. Beyond the fetish of king and crumpet, Beckon the rays of an honorable dawn.

*Hence proving that Unbreakable isn’t the same as Unboreable.

Now it was run down, crumbling, beautiful, and inhabited only by Grandpa, entirely alone. But then hope had crept in. A man, Grandpa wrote, had offered to rent Hudson Castle. He had offered to transform it into a school. Grandpa would stay on as a governor; it would give him new purpose, something to do. No paperwork had been signed, but the man was eager to begin renovations. The man’s name was Sorrotore, a New York millionaire. He enclosed a press cutting, showing a man standing outside a vast New York building, smiling at the camera with Hollywood teeth. “Victor Sorrotore outside his home in the Dakota,” read the caption. “Victor Sorrotore,” whispered Vita, and she memorized his face, just in case. Within a week, Sorrotore struck. Grandpa returned from an afternoon walk to find his way back home barred. A strange man with two guard dogs came out of the caretaker’s cottage and pointed a rifle at him. “Hudson Castle belongs to Mr. Sorrotore,” the guard had said. “Scram!” Grandpa had never in his adult life been told to scram. He had tried to push past the guard, and one of the dogs had bitten his ankle; not a snap but a true bite, which drew blood. The gun was leveled at his chest. Bewildered, he took the train to New York, rented the tiny apartment on Seventh Avenue, and found Sorrotore’s lawyer.

Remember and remember again, that in dark times all a man need do is seek the truth. Protect it and speak it. Then, even if he is a wanderer for years and years, righteousness shall survive while the tallest of castles crumble.

It was a reminder in this time of tarnishing gilt, that should all else crumble, memories of gestures made, thoughtfulness considered, and seeds of inspiration planted, might outlast all.

High above, on the side of a cliff, stood the largest castle I'd ever seen—ever imagined. The windows glowed with candlelight, as the last desperate rays of light silhouetted the castle against a gray sky. I knew Britain was famous for old crumbly buildings, but this place was ridiculous.

Jackson and I aren’t close, but right now there’s a connection in the way my heart begins to alter its beat to match the rhythm echoing through his chest. The steady thump grounds me. He doesn’t say anything else as he rubs soft circles against my skin. Just this once, I’ll let myself accept the comfort. Just this once. I’ll let someone into my shiny castle to see how it is crumbling inside.