Dark Ambience Quotes

The dark organ music filled the Department of Post-Mortem Communications. Moist assumed it was all part of the ambience, although the mood would have been more precisely obtained if the tune it was playing did not appear to be Cantate and Fugue for someone Who Has Trouble with the Pedals.

All the little Indians in a half circle around Aunt Emily are getting an imprinting that will last for life. The sound of her voice reading will condition how they look upon themselves and the world. It will become part of the loved ambience of Battell Pond, a glint in the chromatic wonder of childhood. These small sensibilities will never lose the images of dark woods and bright lake. Nature to them will always be beneficent and female.

Flattery was a prime department store strategy for cultivating customers, and men got a heavy dose. Males could expect to be treated like busy executives and discriminating men of the world. Men’s sections, floors, and entire stores were designed to resemble opulent clubs, often outfitted with wood-paneled grills that women customers were not permitted to enter. Vandervoort’s and Filene’s went to somewhat unusual lengths in furnishing a men’s lounge and smoking room, oddly working against the prevailing assumption that men had no time to spare. In Halle’s new men’s store of the late 1920s, dark mahogany paneling and carved marble detailing created the ambience of a priestly inner sanctum. Filene’s furnished an indoor putting green in its men’s store of 1928. Wanamaker’s outdid itself in 1932, the unlucky Depression year it opened its luxurious six-story men’s store in the Lincoln-Liberty building, with stocks of British imports and an equestrian shop too. Both Wanamaker’s and Marshall Field sold airplanes. Lord & Taylor reserved its tenth floor in New York City for men, with heman departments for cutlery, the home bar, and barbecue equipment. Gimbels, Macy’s, and Hearn’s stuck to more basic appeals, using their large liquor departments to attract men.

With every stop, the happy drunks from the Capitol hopped off and were replaced with the dark travelers of the night. The new passengers were those worn-out workers coming home from their dead end jobs or the nightcrawlers of the evening industries who were just heading out to do business. They all exuded this heavy ambience, like a collected and withheld sigh. I felt so out of place. It was a complete buzzkill.

*CZARNECKI, JOSEPH P.* Art was not a cultural frivolity to the inmates of Auschwitz; it literally kept their spirits alive. It was self-expression in the teeth of the annihilation of the self. It was an expresison of the the need to retain psychological coherance in a malebolent ambience whose essential purpose was the destruction of the psyche of its inahabitants. The words 'I am' written on a wall are the epitaph of someone about to die....Picasso said that 'painting is an instrument of war to be waged against brutality and darkness.