Gothic Classics Quotes

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But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Carmilla)
If your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Carmilla)
Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Carmilla)
Everybody is, I suppose, either Classic or Gothic by nature. Either you feel in your bones that buildings should be rectangular boxes with lids to them, or you are moved to the marrow by walls that climb and branch, and break into a inflorescence of pinnacles.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation…our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys
Leslie Fielder
HANNAH: ....English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the Grand Tour. Here, look -- Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia! And here, superimposed by Richard Noakes, untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It's the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires.
Tom Stoppard (Arcadia)
Mr. Hooper spent a long life, irreproachable in outward act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though unloved, and dimly feared; a man apart from men, shunned in their health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Minister's Black Veil - Original Edition)
In the fantasy I spun for myself that night before falling asleep, those deep dark secrets were revealed. That simple touch became a violent embrace, worthy of any bodice-ripper. There were a certain number of gleeful perversions committed on Ivan's battered leather sofa. And at some point in the fantasy, Ivan was a vampire, because I was sort of weird that way. He was a real, Gothic-style, Bram Stoker sort of vampire who bit people as a metaphor for having dubious-consent, alpha-male sex with them, I should point out. None of your modern, sensitive vampires for me. I appreciated the classics.
Delphine Dryden (The Theory of Attraction (Science of Temptation, #1))
Gormenghast. Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs... And darkness winds between the characters. - Gormenghast
Mervyn Peake
Her eyes were a poem; their every glance was a song.
Théophile Gautier (Clarimonde)
Her eyes were a poem; their every glance was a song
Théophile Gautier (La Morte Amoureuse)
He seemed so confident that I, remembering my own confidence two nights before and with the baneful result, felt awe and vague terror. It must have been my weakness that made me hesitate to tell it to my friend, but I felt it all the more, like unshed tears.
Bram Stoker (Bram Stoker's Dracula)
For me, the watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; strained by dread: such dread as children only can feel.
Charlotte Brontë
He fell at my feet, with words of love. . .with words of love in his dead mouth. . .
Gaston Leroux (The Phantom of the Opera)
partly as an expedient for exercising any untried resources of mind.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein (The Uncensored 1818 Edition): A Gothic Classic - considered to be one of the earliest examples of Science Fiction)
What was it — I paused to think — what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered.
Théophile Gautier (Halloween Collection Treat: 600+ Chilling Macabre Classics, Supernatural Mysteries, Gothic Novels & Horror Thrillers)
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.
Théophile Gautier (Halloween Collection Treat: 600+ Chilling Macabre Classics, Supernatural Mysteries, Gothic Novels & Horror Thrillers)
He satisfied my curiosity, for Erik, who is a real monster - I have seen him at work in Persia, alas - is also, in certain respects, a regular child, vain and self-conceited, and there is nothing he loves so much, ater astonishing people, as to prove all the really miraculous ingenuity of his mind.
Gaston Leroux (The Phantom of the Opera)
Tradition is a detestable peddler of errors, to which, alas, the Devil lends a long and tenacious life.
Jean Ray (Malpertuis: The Classic Modern Gothic Novel)
These tales excited in us a playful desire of imitation.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein (The Uncensored 1818 Edition): A Gothic Classic - considered to be one of the earliest examples of Science Fiction)
have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature, while I have not scrupled to innovate upon their combinations.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein (The Uncensored 1818 Edition): A Gothic Classic - considered to be one of the earliest examples of Science Fiction)
inuring my body to hardship.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein (The Uncensored 1818 Edition): A Gothic Classic - considered to be one of the earliest examples of Science Fiction)
tread a land never before imprinted by the foot of man.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein (The Uncensored 1818 Edition): A Gothic Classic - considered to be one of the earliest examples of Science Fiction)
I'd not be shocked if bad water was the source of all the moody Gothic Lit classics. With a few cases of hookworm to add some Southern spunk.
Damon Thomas (Some Books Are Not For Sale (Rural Gloom))
And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.
Daphne du Maurier (Rebeca)
Welcome to my house. Come freely; and leave something of the happiness you bring
Bram Stoker (Dracula)
Doctor, you don’t know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don’t; you couldn’t with eyebrows like yours.
Bram Stoker (Dracula: Bram Stoker's Classic Horror Thriller by Bram Stoker: Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. (Best Classic Horror Novels of All Time))
Look! he’s good corn; he will make good crop when the time comes.
Bram Stoker (Dracula: Bram Stoker's Classic Horror Thriller by Bram Stoker: Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. (Best Classic Horror Novels of All Time))
Well, I shall tell you. My thesis is this: I want you to believe.
Bram Stoker (Dracula: Bram Stoker's Classic Horror Thriller by Bram Stoker: Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. (Best Classic Horror Novels of All Time))
Non rivelai mai il mio amore verbalmente; però se gli sguardi hanno un linguaggio, anche il più perfetto idiota avrebbe potuto indovinare che io ne ero perdutamente innamorato.
Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)
My revenge has just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine...
Bram Stoker ("Dracula" by Bram Stoker: Dracula by Bram Stoker: The Timeless Classic of Gothic Horror)
I'm a very good-looking fellow, eh?. . .When a woman has seen me, as you have, she belongs to me. She loves me forever. I am a kind of Don Juan, you know!
Gaston Leroux (The Phantom of the Opera)
What beautiful hyacinths! I have just learnt to love a hyacinth. -- Catherine Morland
Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)
Radcliffe,
H.P. Lovecraft (The Greatest Gothic Classics of All Time: 60+ Books in One Volume: Frankenstein, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Phantom Ship, The Birth Mark, The Headless Horseman…)
She is Creole girl, and she have the sun in her. Tell the truth now. She don't come to your house in this place England they tell me about, she don't come to your beautiful house to beg you to marry with her. No, it's you come all the long way to her house - it's you beg her to marry. And she love you and she give you all she have. Now you say you don't love her and you break her up. What you do with her money, eh?
Jean Rhys
I am no longer young. And my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements.
Bram Stoker (Dracula)
You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
The pilgrimage of Italy, which I now accomplished, had long been the object of my curious devotion. The passage of Mount Cenis, the regular streets of Turin, the Gothic cathedral of Milan, the scenery of the Boromean Islands, the marble palaces of Genoa, the beauties of Florence, the wonders of Rome, the curiosities of Naples, the galleries of Bologna, the singular aspect of Venice, the amphitheatre of Verona, and the Palladian architecture of Vicenza, are still present to my imagination. I read the Tuscan writers on the banks of the Arno; but my conversation was with the dead rather than the living, and the whole college of Cardinals was of less value in my eyes than the transfiguration of Raphael, the Apollo of the Vatican, or the massy greatness of the Coliseum. It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind. After Rome has kindled and satisfied the enthusiasm of the Classic pilgrim, his curiosity for all meaner objects insensibly subsides.
Edward Gibbon (Autobiographies; printed verbatim from hitherto unpublished MSS., with an introd. by the Earl of Sheffield. Edited by John Murray)
She moved as lightly as a mote of dust gamboling in a sunbeam passing through the stained glass window of a French Gothic cathedral. Her breasts stood up proudly like twin tin soldiers. Looking at her made him feel an uncontrollable urge to vomit forth his innermost feelings, straight at her.
Howard Mittelmark (How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them—A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide)
And you are right. There will be pain for us all; but it will not be all pain, nor will this pain be the last. We and you too—you most of all, my dear boy—will have to pass through the bitter water before we reach the sweet. But we must be brave of heart and unselfish, and do our duty, and all will be well!
Bram Stoker (Dracula: Bram Stoker's Classic Horror Thriller by Bram Stoker: Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. (Best Classic Horror Novels of All Time))
I tell you, sir, that the end of the world has come. No one has ever beheld such outbreaks among the students! It is the accursed inventions of this century that are ruining everything — artilleries, bombards, and, above all, printing, that other German pest. No more manuscripts, no more books! printing will kill bookselling. It is the end of the world that is drawing nigh.
H.P. Lovecraft (The Greatest Gothic Classics of All Time: 60+ Books in One Volume: Frankenstein, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Phantom Ship, The Birth Mark, The Headless Horseman…)
In the 1830s, designers wanted buildings that looked Gothic, but they had no real understanding of the planning and construction behind it. This dichotomy is evident in Charles Barry’s Houses of Parliament: Gothic topdressing on an essentially Classical building. (Passing the Houses of Parliament one day, Augustus Welby Pugin commented: ‘All Grecian, sir. Tudor details on a Classic body.
Catharine Arnold (Necropolis: London and Its Dead)
Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman. The sun does not more certainly shine in the heavens, than that which I now affirm is true. Some miracle might have produced it, yet the stages of the discovery were distinct and probable. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life, nay, more; I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein (The Uncensored 1818 Edition): A Gothic Classic - considered to be one of the earliest examples of Science Fiction)
English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour. Here, look – Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia! And here, superimposed by Richard Noakes, untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It’s the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires. There’s an account of my hermit in a letter by your illustrious namesake.
Tom Stoppard (Arcadia (Faber Drama))
L'affaire du couvent des Pères Blancs ne fut pas mauvaise. J'aurais pu faire main basse sur bien des choses précieuses mais, pour être un indévot, je ne suis pas un incroyant et l'idée seule de m'emparer d'objets du culte, même s'ils sont d'or et d'argent massifs, m'emplit d'horreur. Les bons moins pleureront leurs palimpsestes, incunables et antiphonaires disparus, mais ils loueront le Seigneur d'avoir détourné une main impie de leurs ciboires et de leurs ostensoirs. [...] La vente du buste du dieu Terme m'a rapporté une fortune...oui, une fortune. Le quart m'a suffit pour racheter les parchemins, incunables et antiphonaires dérobés aux bons Pères Blancs. Demain, je leur enverrai leur bien en leur demandant des prières...et non pour moi seul. Mais j'ai gardé le mémoire. Ils me doivent bien cela.
Jean Ray (Malpertuis: The Classic Modern Gothic Novel)
In my introduction to Warriors, the first of our crossgenre anthologies, I talked about growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, in the 1950s, a city without a single bookstore. I bought all my reading material at newsstands and the corner “candy shops,” from wire spinner racks. The paperbacks on those spinner racks were not segregated by genre. Everything was jammed in together, a copy of this, two copies of that. You might find The Brothers Karamazov sandwiched between a nurse novel and the latest Mike Hammer yarn from Mickey Spillane. Dorothy Parker and Dorothy Sayers shared rack space with Ralph Ellison and J. D. Salinger. Max Brand rubbed up against Barbara Cartland. A. E. van Vogt, P. G. Wodehouse, and H. P. Lovecraft were crammed in with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mysteries, Westerns, gothics, ghost stories, classics of English literature, the latest contemporary “literary” novels, and, of course, SF and fantasy and horror—you could find it all on that spinner rack, and ten thousand others like it. I liked it that way. I still do. But in the decades since (too many decades, I fear), publishing has changed, chain bookstores have multiplied, the genre barriers have hardened. I think that’s a pity. Books should broaden us, take us to places we have never been and show us things we’ve never seen, expand our horizons and our way of looking at the world. Limiting your reading to a single genre defeats that. It limits us, makes us smaller. It seemed to me, then as now, that there were good stories and bad stories, and that was the only distinction that truly mattered.
George R.R. Martin (Rogues)
C: always had the sound of English k. The facts upon which this statement is founded are as follows: (a) The pronunciation of this letter is so described for us by Martianus Capella (III. 261) as to prove it a hard palatal. (b) C took the place of an original k in the early alphabet as previously stated; and in succeeding ages at times c reappears in inscriptions indifferently before the various vowels. Thus we have the form Caelius alternating with Kaelius, Cerus with Kerus, and decembres with dekembres,—showing that c and k were identical in sound. Quintilian (I. 7. 10) says: "As regards k, I think it should not be used in any words...This remark I have not failed to make, for the reason that there are some who think k necessary when a follows; though there is the letter C, which has the same power before all vowels." (c) In the Greek transliteration of Latin names, Latin c is always represented by k; and in Latin transliteration of Greek names, k is always represented by Latin c. And we know that Greek k was never assibilated before any vowel. Suidas calls the C on the Roman senators' shoes, "the Roman kappa." (d) Words taken into Gothic and Old High German from the Latin at an early period invariably represent Latin c by k; thus, Latin carcer gives the Gothic karkara and the German Kerker; Latin Caesar gives the German Kaiser; Latin lucerna gives the Gothic lukarn; the Latin cellarium gives the German Keller; the Latin cerasus gives the German Kirsche. Also in late Hebrew, Latin c is regularly represented in transliteration by the hard consonant kôph. [Advocates of the English system claim that Latin c had the sound of s before e or i because every modern language derived from the Latin has in some way modified c when thus used. It is true that modern languages have so modified it; but, as already noted, the modern languages are the children not of the classical Latin spoken in the days of Cicero, but of the provincial Latin spoken five or six centuries later. There is no doubt that at this late period, Latin c had become modified before e or i so as to be equivalent to s or z. Latin words received into German at this time represent c before e or i by z. But had this modification been a part of the usage of the classical language, it would have been noticed by the grammarians, who discuss each letter with great minuteness. Now no grammarian ever mentions more than one sound for Latin c. Again, if Latin c had ever had the sound of s, surely some of the Greeks, ignorant of Latin and spelling by ear, would at least occasionally have represented Latin c by σ,—a thing which none of them has ever done. It is probable that the modification of c which is noticed in the modern languages was a characteristic of the Umbrian and Oscan dialects and so prevailed to some extent in the provinces, but there is absolutely not the slightest evidence to show that it formed a part of the pronunciation of cultivated men at Rome.]
Harry Thurston Peck (Latin Pronunciation A Short Exposition of the Roman Method)
I could understand the impulse to make the novel more accessible. I want as many people as possible to read The Mill on the Floss too. But like paperback editions of classic novels issued with updated covers resembling those of Twilight, it seemed a pandering and misbegotten effort, as if no young reader today might possibly pick up a novel written one hundred and fifty years ago unless the book were in sexy neo-Gothic drag.
Rebecca Mead (My Life in Middlemarch)
Having thus disposed in his merciless way of an incautious adversary, Randolph proceeded to expose the follies of seeking abstract harmony in government, of expecting the great venerable Gothic edifice of society to conform to ideal classical proportions; with Burke, he believed that a state is better governed by the irregular patterns formed by common sense and tradition than by the laws of mathematics and the Procrustean methods of omnipotent majorities.
Russell Kirk (Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in Conservative Thought)
İnsanlık zaafları genç zihinler tarafından asla seve isteye kabullenilmez. Etkileri tanımsız olduğu kadar değişken de olan birtakım amaçlar üstünden hayatlarımızı sürdürdüğümüzü; dün bizi büyük bir güçle etkileyen şeyin bugün hayal meyal hissedilebileceğini, hatta belki yarın göz ardı edilebileceğini bilmek bize acı verir. Bu tatsız gerçeği nihayet kabullendiğimizdeyse, iyilik ne zaman karşımıza çıksa onu tiksintiyle reddeder, hükmedemeyeceğimiz bir mutluluğu paylaşmaktan uzak durur ve sık sık geçici bir karamsarlığa kapılırız. Sonunda tecrübe ya da tesadüf bizi bu hatamızdan geri döndürür ve üzerimizde keyifli ama kalıcı bir etki yaratabilecek bir amaç sunar bize. İşte o etkiye mutluluk deriz. Mutluluğun zevk diye anılan duygudan farkı, temelinde erdemin yatıyor olmasıdır ve erdem de aklın ürünü olduğundan, istikrarlı bir etki yaratabilecek kapasiteye sahiptir.
Ann Radcliffe (A Sicilian Romance: The 1790 Gothic Literature Classic (Annotated))
The hour's bell tolls like the weight of snow, burying the world of sight. Eternal time that passes, forsaking heart's song.
Susan L. Marshall (Wild Soul: Contemporary Classical Winter Poetry)
Though other cultures-like the Sumerian, the Mayan, and the Indic-coupled human destiny with long vistas of abstract calendar time, the essential contribution of the Renascence was to relate the cumulative results of history to the variety of cultural achievements that marked the successive generations. By unburying statues, monuments, buildings, cities, by reading old books and inscriptions, by re-entering a long-abandoned world of ideas, these new explorers in time became aware of fresh potentialities in their own existence. These pioneers of the mind invented a time-machine more wonderful than H.G. Wells' technological contraption. At a moment when the new mechanical world-picture had no place for 'time' except as a function of movement in space, historic time-duration, in Henri Bergson's sense, which includes persistence through replication, imitation, and memory-began to play a conscious part in day-to-day choices. If the living present could be visibly transformed, or at least deliberately modified from Gothic to a formalized Classic structure, so could the future be remolded, too. Historic time could be colonized and cultivated, and human culture itself became a collective artifact. The sciences actually profited by this historic restoration, getting a fresh impetus from Thales, Democritus, Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria.
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
Cultures are organisms," Spengler explains, "and world-history is their collective biography." Like any other vital organism, then, each culture goes through the stages of youth, maturity, and decline. "Culture is the prime phenomenon of all past and future world-history." "Every Culture has its own Civilization...The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture....Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again." Thus, while the culture is a period of ebullient creativity, the civilization that inevitably follows is a period of reflection, organization, and search for material comfort and convenience. For example, classical Greece was the culture; imperial Rome the civilization. From the beauties of Greek poetry to the imperialism of Roman law, we now live in the civilization of Western ("Faustian") culture and cannot avoid the consequences. Among these Spengler foresaw the "megalopolis," the city of faceless masses, the omnipotence of money, and a new Caesarism.
Daniel J. Boorstin (The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World)
But I will not thank you now, for all thanks would feebly speak my feelings.
Anna Eliza Bray (The White Hoods - An Historical Romance)
They were sketches of buildings such as had never stood on the face of the earth. They were as the first houses built by the first man born, who had never heard of others building before him. There was nothing to be said of them, except that each structure was inevitably what it had to be. It was not as if the draftsman had sat over them, pondering laboriously, piecing together doors, windows and columns, as his whim dictated and as the books prescribed. It was as if the buildings had sprung from the earth and from some living force, complete, unalterably right. The hand that had made the sharp pencil lines still had much to learn. But not a line seemed superfluous, not a needed plane was missing. The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity. No laws had dictated a single detail. The buildings were not Classical, they were not Gothic, they were not Renaissance. They were only Howard Roark.
Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
I have been to Mont Saint-Michel, which I had not seen before. What a sight, when one arrives as I did, at Avranches toward the end of the day! The town stands on a hill, and I was taken into the public garden at the extremity of the town. I uttered a cry of astonishment. An extraordinarily large bay lay extended before me, as far as my eyes could reach, between two hills which were lost to sight in the mist; and in the middle of this immense yellow bay, under a clear, golden sky, a peculiar hill rose up, sombre and pointed in the midst of the sand. The sun had just disappeared, and under the still flaming sky the outline of that fantastic rock stood out, which bears on its summit a fantastic monument. At daybreak I went to it. The tide was low as it had been the night before, and I saw that wonderful abbey rise up before me as I approached it. After several hours’ walking, I reached the enormous mass of rocks which supports the little town, dominated by the great church. Having climbed the steep and narrow street, I entered the most wonderful Gothic building that has ever been built to God on earth, as large as a town, full of low rooms which seem buried beneath vaulted roofs, and lofty galleries supported by delicate columns. I entered this gigantic granite jewel which is as light as a bit of lace, covered with towers, with slender belfries to which spiral staircases ascend, and which raise their strange heads that bristle with chimeras, with devils, with fantastic animals, with monstrous flowers, and which are joined together by finely carved arches, to the blue sky by day, and to the black sky by night.
Elsinore Books (Classic Short Stories: The Complete Collection: All 100 Masterpieces)
By the sacred earth on which I kneel, by the shades that wander near me, by the deep and eternal grief that I feel, I swear; and by thee, O Night, and the spirits that preside over thee, to pursue the daemon who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict.
360 Planet (50 Classic Gothic Works Vol. 1: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Black Cat, The Picture Of Dorian Gray...)
I have been to Mont Saint-Michel, which I had not seen before. What a sight, when one arrives as I did, at Avranches toward the end of the day! The town stands on a hill, and I was taken into the public garden at the extremity of the town. I uttered a cry of astonishment. An extraordinarily large bay lay extended before me, as far as my eyes could reach, between two hills which were lost to sight in the mist; and in the middle of this immense yellow bay, under a clear, golden sky, a peculiar hill rose up, sombre and pointed in the midst of the sand. The sun had just disappeared, and under the still flaming sky the outline of that fantastic rock stood out, which bears on its summit a fantastic monument. At daybreak I went to it. The tide was low as it had been the night before, and I saw that wonderful abbey rise up before me as I approached it. After several hours’ walking, I reached the enormous mass of rocks which supports the little town, dominated by the great church. Having climbed the steep and narrow street, I entered the most wonderful Gothic building that has ever been built to God on earth, as large as a town, full of low rooms which seem buried beneath vaulted roofs, and lofty galleries supported by delicate columns. I entered this gigantic granite jewel which is as light as a bit of lace, covered with towers, with slender belfries to which spiral staircases ascend, and which raise their strange heads that bristle with chimeras, with devils, with fantastic animals, with monstrous flowers, and which are joined together by finely carved arches, to the blue sky by day, and to the black sky by night. When I had reached the summit, I said to the monk who accompanied me: “Father, how happy you must be here!” And he replied: “It is very windy, Monsieur;
Elsinore Books (Classic Short Stories: The Complete Collection: All 100 Masterpieces)
All in all, the West has displayed far more territorial movements, cultural novelties, and revolutions in the sciences and arts. For this reason, answering ‘where is the West?’ requires one to ask ‘what is the West?’ with an awareness of the fact that both the ‘what’ and the ‘where’ have changed over time.[40] This civilisation, for example, is not simply ‘Christian’ in the way others are ‘Confucian’ or ‘Hindu’ in a more stable, less varying way. Its Christian character alone has been infused with a theological and institutional dynamic (flowing from its synthesis with Classical reason and Indo-European aristocratic expansionism) stimulating a multiplicity of monastic movements (i.e. Cluniacs, Cistercians, Franciscans, Dominicans etc.) and heterodox movements (Pelagians, Waldensians, Cathars etc.), not to mention Crusades and numerous Protestant denominations lacking elsewhere.[41] The West — depending on locality, time, and groups — has been Platonic, Aristotelian, Epicurean, Stoic, Cynic, Augustinian, Monarchist, Newtonian, Gothic, Anglican, Humanist, Republican, Machiavellian, Hegelian, Fascist, Marxist, Darwinian, Surrealist, Cubist, Romantic, Socialist, Liberal, and much more. By contrast, the intellectual traditions set down in ancient/medieval times in China, the Near East, India, and Japan would persist in their essentials until the impact of the West brought some novelties.
Ricardo Duchesne (Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age)
The Young Tradition’s third and final album, Galleries (1968), was an epic of time-banditry, whizzing through the seven ages of English folk song, from field to ballad to seventeenth-century Puritan hymns. It boldly juxtaposed music by Renaissance poet Thomas Campion and Methodist preacher Charles Wesley, making one daring leap forward to blues singer Robert Johnson’s complaint of stones in his passway, and with a pastiche ‘Medieval Mystery Tour’ copped from Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. A staple diet of English folk was also included in the shape of ‘John Barleycorn’, ‘The Husband and the Servingman’ and ‘The Bitter Withy’. But the most eyebrow-raising element was the instrumental ensemble that made its guest appearance on two songs, Campion’s ‘What If a Day’ and the traditional ‘Agincourt Carol’. The Early Music Consort’s David Munrow, Christopher Hogwood and Roddy and Adam Skeaping were among the first of a new breed of authentic instrumentalists, avid collectors of medieval rebecs, shawms and hurdy-gurdies, reviving a medieval Gothic and Renaissance repertoire all but lost to the classical mainstream. Their approach was at once scholarly and populist; in what was to prove a short life, Munrow managed to raise the profile of Early Music significantly, with around fifty recordings and plentiful appearances on TV and radio. Munrow and Bellamy had this in common: neither was afraid to tilt quixotically at a canon.
Rob Young (Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music)
Emaux et Camees, Charpentier's Japanese-paper edition, with
Oscar Wilde (50 Classic Gothic Works You Should Read)
from what our official accounts allow.28 Schwaller too recognized that whoever built the Sphinx, the Great Pyramid, and the temples at Luxor and Karnak was mathematically and cosmologically astute. From 1936 to 1951, Schwaller and his wife, Isha, herself the author of a series of novels about ancient Egypt (Her-Bak: Egyptian Initiate is the best known), studied the ancient Egyptian monuments. Schwaller found evidence in them for pi, but also for much more: a knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes, of the Pythagorean theorem centuries in advance of Pythagoras, of the circumference of the globe, as well as evidence of ϕ (phi), known as the Golden Section, a mathematical proportion that was again supposedly unknown until it was discovered by the Greeks. As John Anthony West makes clear, the Golden Section is more than an important item in classical architecture. It is, according to Schwaller, the mathematical archetype of the universe, the reason why we have an “asymmetrical” “lumpy” world of galaxies and planets, and not a flattened-out, homogenous one, a question that today occupies contemporary cosmologists.29 In his writings, Schwaller linked phi to planetary orbits, to the architecture of Gothic cathedrals, and to plant and animal forms.
Gary Lachman (The Secret Teachers of the Western World)
On the one hand, Gothic art abandons the decorative and predominantly cumulative style of Romanesque composition, replacing this by forms more akin to the classical, based upon the principle of concentration. On the other hand, it breaks up the whole, which in Romanesque art was at least pervaded by a certain decorative unity, into a number of partial compositions, each one in the main built up according to the classical principle of unity and of subordination, but in total giving the effect of a rather indiscriminate conglomeration of subjects.
Arnold Hauser (The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages)
But is is by no means those aspects of Dürer's style which it shares with Italian art that makes it so attractive especially for Pontormo and those who like him, but rather the spiritual depth and inwardness - in other words, the qualities which they miss most in classical Italian art. The antitheses of "Gothic" and "Renaissance", however, which are largely smoothed out in Dürer himself, are still irreconciled and irreconcilable in the outlook of mannerism.
Arnold Hauser (The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque)
The matrix out of which these powerful decisions are born is sometimes called racism, sometimes classicism, sometimes sexism. Each is an accurate term surely, but each is also misleading. The source is a deplorable inability to project, to become the “other,” to imagine her or him. It is an intellectual flaw, a shortening of the imagination, and reveals an ignorance of gothic proportions as well as a truly laughable lack of curiosity.
Toni Morrison (The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations)
Besides, my dear sir, poverty cannot deprive us of intellectual delights. It cannot deprive you of the comfort of affording me examples of fortitude and benevolence; nor me of the delight of consoling a beloved parent. It cannot deaden our taste for the grand, and the beautiful, or deny us the means of indulging it; for the scenes of nature—those sublime spectacles, so infinitely superior to all artificial luxuries! are open for the enjoyment of the poor, as well as of the rich. Of what, then, have we to complain, so long as we are not in want of necessaries? Pleasures, such as wealth cannot buy, will still be ours. We retain, then, the sublime luxuries of nature, and lose only the frivolous ones of art.
360 Planet (50 Classic Gothic Works Vol. 1: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Black Cat, The Picture Of Dorian Gray...)
The structures were austere and simple, until one looked at them and realized what work, what complexity of method, what tension of thought had achieved the simplicity. No laws had dictated a single detail. The buildings were not Classical, they were not Gothic, they were not Renaissance. They were only Howard Roark.
Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
The metaphorical structuring of concepts is necessarily partial and is reflected in the lexicon of the language, including the phrasal lexicon, which contains fixed-form expressions such as "to be without foundation." Because concepts are metaphorically structured in a systematic way, e.g., THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, it is possible for us to use expressions (construct, foundation) from one domain (BUILDINGS) to talk about corresponding concepts in the metaphorically defined domain (THEORIES). What foundation, for example, means in the metaphorically defined domain (THEORY) will depend on the details of how the metaphorical concept THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS iS used to structure the concept THEORY. The parts of the concept BUILDING that are used to structure the concept THEORY are the foundation and the outer shell. The roof, internal rooms, staircases, and hallways are parts of a building not used as part of the concept THEORY. Thus the metaphor THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS has a "used" part (foundation and outer shell) and an "unused" part (rooms, staircases, etc.). Expressions such as construct and foundation are instances of the used part of such a metaphorical concept and are part of our ordinary literal language about theories. But what of the linguistic expressions that reflect the "unused" part of a metaphor like THEORIES ARE BUILD-INGS? Here are four examples: • His theory has thousands of little rooms and long, winding corridors. • His theories are Bauhaus in their pseudofunctional simplicity. • He prefers massive Gothic theories covered with gargoyles. Complex theories usually have problems with the plumbing. These sentences fall outside the domain of normal literal language and are part of what is usually called "figurative" or "imaginative" language. Thus, literal expressions ("He has constructed a theory") and imaginative expressions ("His theory is covered with gargoyles") can be instances of the same general metaphor (THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS). Here we can distinguish three different subspecies of imaginative (or nonliteral) metaphor: • extensions of the used part of a metaphor, e.g., "These facts are the bricks and mortar of my theory." Here the outer shell of the building is referred to, whereas the THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS metaphor stops short of mentioning the materials used. • instances of the unused part of the literal metaphor, e.g., "His theory has thousands of little rooms and long, winding corridors." • instances of novel metaphor, that is, a metaphor not used to structure part of our normal conceptual system but as a new way of thinking about something, e.g., "Classical theories are patriarchs who father many children, most of whom fight incessantly." Each of these subspecies lies outside the used part of a metaphorical concept that structures our normal conceptual system.
George Lakoff (Metaphors We Live By)
I was coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o’clock of a black winter morning,
Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: The Original 1886 Unabridged Edition – A Gothic Classic Exploring Duality, Identity, and the Human Psyche (Grapevine Edition))