Gothic Romance Quotes

I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.

You say one more thing that sounds like it's ripped from the pages of a really bad gothic romance and I'm out of here, are we clear?" - Valkyrie Cain

One hand was behind his back, and he held it out, presenting a bouquet of white and smoky purple lilies. “They’re straight from the underworld, by the way. They are everlasting. They won’t die.

Everybody is equally weak on the inside, just that some present their ruins as new castles and become kings –

All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.

Oh, he did look like a deity – the perfect balance of danger and charm, he was at the same time fascinating and inaccessible, distant because of his demonstrated flawlessness, and possessing such strength of character that he was dismaying and at the same time utterly attractive in an enticing and forbidden way.

I always am in a role, lovely – for you, for them – even for myself. Yeah... Even when I’m alone, I am still in a role – and I myself am the most exacting audience I have ever had.

Desires are what can most easily ruin us, lovely.

And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself. But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed roles...

I’d love to try to tame you... And I would simply adore it if you turn out untamable –

Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lost memories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreams play when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?

Mine first --mine last-- mine even in the grave!

I will render you as you really were, neither cast in pristine stained glass or unholy fire. I will make you into nothing more than a man, tender and brutal in equal measure, and perhaps in doing so I will justify myself to you. To my own haunted conscience.

I would’ve kissed you bathed in blood, Corvina. If I had a chance to kiss you while a thousand ghosts rose from their graves, I would have kissed you. Don’t doubt that.

Her hands crept around his neck, tangling in his hair to keep him closer, even though she knew that beautiful boys with expiration dates couldn't be held, only borrowed for a time.

Have a look around, my pretty, we are surrounded by Death in all forms – just the two of us are still alive –

I was never able to accept anyone else’s support but my own –

And what if you try to kill me? Or worse: to kiss me?

I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us.

Paranoia. The more you think of an imaginary problem, the more you feel as though it’s real –

Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.

All cats are gray in the dark. And besides, her actions have less to do with her, and everything to do with you.

Even I don’t know myself... In fact, I don’t know if I really have a self at all, as I’m constantly playing different roles and pretending – not so much on stage as in real life...

A good enemy can be better than the best of friend.

Emotions don’t interfere in my acting, nor in my life.

I can’t help but ask, “Do you know where you are?” She turns to me with a foreboding glare. “Do you?

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous." (Great Thought, February 19, 1938)

You kissed me once and now you feel as if you’ve got some special kind of licence to do it whenever you want?

Don't resent me when I've only just gotten you, please, for I am what makes this world beautiful.

So, apart from casting runes, what other hobbies do you have? Forbidden rituals, human sacrifices, torturing? –

You can speak to me like you haven’t spoken even to yourself.

Marriage could hardly be like the passionate romances one read about in books. It seemed to her, in fact, a rotten deal. Men would be solicitous and well behaved when they courted a woman, asking her out to parties and sending her flowers, but once they married, the flowers wilted.

There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomach in a hangman’s noose. It is this same lack in noise that lives, there! in the darkness of the grave, how it frightens me beyond all things.

She no longer feared what brewed within her, and she was done making apologies for who she was. Signa would not just burn; she would ignite.

You know what, your imagination works faster than your mind.

you always felt they were pawns in an indifferent universe, butts of an existential joke with no punch line.

Did Bach ever eat pancakes at midnight?

You are not cursed-you are a reaper. You are the night incarnate, the ferrier of souls. You are the bridge between the living and the dead—a caged bird that's ready to fly. So spread your wings, Signa Farrow, because you are limitless. Spread your wings, and oh, how we'll fly.

People do not ever change. The person you see later is merely the one that was hidden from you in the beginning. Shane KP O'Neill - The Gates Of Babylon.

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment." (A Qualified Farewell)

My heart, for unknown reasons, seems to freeze in motion in my chest. I can see he senses it and he holds his pause to enjoy my suffering, prolonging my ignorance. “Viktor, what?

When her mind was discomposed... a book was the opiate that lulled it to repose.

Profanity is the expression of a lesser mind.

The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is. There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside. Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts

...perhaps we only notice things when the time comes for us to pay attention to them. When they need us to see them…

I lie more convincingly than I tell the truth.

I dove down deep into your psyche, turning over every word you gave me like a jewel. Looking for meaning, seeking out the mysteries of you. I didn't care if I lost myself in the process. I wanted to be brought by the hand into your world and disappear into your kiss until us two could no longer be told apart.

The utter unbroken silence was more appalling than any ominous noise, than the loudest yells of anguish, than the most piercing screaming... Dead silence. Literally dead.

History doesn’t start with a tall building and a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is taking us for suckers and is playing a mean game.

I never really wanted to die. But I followed through anyway. The pain in my heart was excruciating, and death was beautiful.

The beauty of a woman is that no two are the same. They are all different. It follows then that to be successful as a lover, you cannot make love to any two in the same way.

You Just scared me half to death," I said. "You should be thrilled you're halfway there.

Exercise care with what it is you do when you hold my heart in your hands. For it is my love that makes you special. When it is gone, you shall soon know it and you shall be special no more. Shane KP O'Neill - The Gates Of Babylon

Dying would be normal for me, and one day, I'd be buried beneath a stone, and nothing would matter anymore. It'd be ordinary, like life. And that terrified me, endlessly.

He would die in this room, buried alive by the weight of his life.

Gray. The overcast skies had the colour of deadened stones, and seemed closer than usually, as though they were phlegmatically observing my every movement with their apathetic emptily blue-less eyes; each tiny drop of hazy rain drifting around resembled transparent molten steel, the pavement looked like it was about to burst into disconsolate tears, even the air itself was gray, so ultimate and ubiquitous that colour was everywhere around me. Gray...

I was recently living more comfortably surrounded by secrets... Like dozens of luxurious satiny pillows, they were embracing me from all directions into safe lulling warmth, thus isolating me from the sharp dead-cold edges of the truth hiding behind their endearingly smooth textures and tender soothing colours. Secrets could be so irresistibly beautiful...

My ghost is the only soul who ever comes to cry on my grave... Only the skies cried sincerely on my funeral.

You call out Gods name one more time while im between your legs, even he wont be able to save you little lamb.

It was a privileged existence, but also a cage, beautifully decorated, but locked tight always.

Romance is not the giving of flowers, or any other gift. It is a way of life, a way of being. Romance is every thought, gesture, and deed on your part to make another feel special, even if only for a moment. For a moment can last a lifetime in the heart of the recipient, be that the one you love, or a complete stranger.

With painstaking rumination, the tips of his fingers grazed over my neck, a deafening silence. I didn't move as his hand paused at the base of my throat. He listened to the arrhythmic beating of my heart, my pulse thumping beneath his fingers. He kissed me along my neckline and throat. I almost burst apart from the longing. My blood burned for him.

I was beginning to agree with the thesis that some truths were better off dead. And buried.

Never give up, Never surrender!!!!! If you think you can't, then you must, if you must, then you can..Tony Robbins

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.

Two souls, one body. Zwei Seelen, ein Körper.

I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy spirit, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of story-books and fairy-tales. Was n't it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream?

Noemí was struck with the desire to lean forward and kiss him, a feeling like wishing to light a match, a burning, bright, and eager feeling. Yet she hesitated. It was easy to kiss someone when it didn't matter; it was more difficult when it might be meaningful.

She leaves my side and heads deeper into the apartment singing, “—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… a copper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.

If you are a dream, then it is one from which I do not ever wish to be woken.

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

Its big men are mostly little men with fancy offices and a lot of money. A great many of them are stupid little men, with reach-me-down brains, small-town arrogance and a sort of animal knack of smelling out the taste of the stupidest part of the public. They have played in luck so long that they have come to mistake luck for enlightenment." - on Hollywood

The questions push me further into the space in between, the place where my madness lays waiting for me. I struggle with each question, determined to extract some sort of answer, an explanation for everything that has happened so far. But no answers come and I’m forced to acknowledge the feeling lodged between my two worlds Terror.

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

His character would be blamed, loathed, discussed, and adored – but somewhere there, behind his mask of a hero, Cardew would remain faceless. Anonymous.

Insane love. Loving insanity. Insanity and love...

Alone with the dead! I dare not go out, for I can hear the low howl of the wolf through the broken window.

Is it possible for one to enter sleep and wander while never waking? And if so, for how long can one survive this way?

She wanted me to love her... and stranger still, i wanted to love and be loved by her. Death had become romantic again.

The unknown grayish mystifying forest was benumbed into frost-covered cold, and the tremendous pines towering above the dark marshy soil resembled a gathering of severe mute brothers from a forbidden ancient order worshiping forgotten gods no one had ever heard of outside of the world of secret occult visions.

A human life is a beautiful thing," he said. "You humans.... you feel. You feel so deeply that it consumes you. There were humans I kept a watch over, though I would blink and they'd be fifty, sixty years older—and the time would come for me to meet them. For the longest time, I pitied them for their short lives. And I admit, Signa, that I have grown more callous with my age. But I have also grown to admire humans. They've such a short time to experience their lives, and so they must feel deeply. They must experience in one life-time things it's taken me an eternity to experience. When I see men like Elijah, rather than feel guilt for what I've done, I remember that he feels sorrow because he loved so deeply. And were I not real, Little Bird, were I not Death, he would never have experienced that love. So which is better? To live forever, or to live and love?

Strength and victory... What he would never praise himself for, but whose loss was his most obsessive fear.

The trees seemed to have eyes that were watching us and reaching out for me. They began to take on the shape of the dead.

What a pair we are, intrinsically broken but tied to one another by desire and death.

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.

It seemed to me that Mr. Forrester would approve of a woman who could follow him in conversation and not be baffled by ledgers and currency conversions. I had grossly overestimated him.

He knew what he had found here, a precious treasure that had remained hidden away for so long. To the right man, she could give more happiness and fulfilment than any amount of gold, or gems. Just by holding her in his arms, he knew this. He had the key to her heart in his hands. All he had to do was unlock her, and he would enjoy the most wondrous chest of delights. He knew it and he knew, too, that nothing would ever compensate him should he lose her.

I'm afraid I've done nothing at all to advance the plot." "You chose to come away with me," Ned reminded her. "So this is merely romance," she frowned disapprovingly. "I was hoping for an epic adventure, or a gothic mystery at the very least." Ned laughed. "Darling, don't worry, the story has just begun.

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

I followed the curious intensity behind those dark blue eyes and the moment his eyes changed. Suddenly, my world felt terribly small, like I’d experienced merely a handful of what it had to offer.

I steal one glance over my shoulder as soon as we are far from the foreboding luminance of the neon glow, and it is there that my stomach leaps into my throat. Squatting just shy of the light and partially concealed by the shade of an alley is a sinister silhouette beneath a crimson cowl, beaming a demonic smile which spans from cheek to swollen cheek.

She says it is a school for bluestockings which, according to her, is really only a fashionable way of saying it is a school for ugly girls who cannot find suitable husbands. To tease her, for I believe it is one of his greatest pleasures in this life, my father bought a pair of blue silk stockings for me the day we received my letter of acceptance. That evening and the next, father and I dined alone.

Another tug and a yank at my chestnut curls and she snarls at me, “You are so much like her.” This is something my mother often says and never explains. Though it is a great mystery to me it is also a blessing, for she always hurries from the room after saying it.

How strange the heart was, capable of making you lose your head over a monster.

This daemon loves men whose marriage beds have grown cold, so she can set them ablaze.

But there is nothing, no trace that she’s ever existed. She is not here. She will never be here again. Because of me.

The stars sparkled above the mist shrouded tents and caravans of the carnival. The night crackled with an odd vibration, as if a veil of peculiarity settled over the company.

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

She would've made an excellent pirate.

Chance of romance: nonexistent. Chance of gothic thriller murder mystery: growing by the minute.

I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help but hear a muffled sigh as she decapitates her latest creation with a single push of her hand.

That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their right mind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’. People would much rather say, ‘Get in my whirly-gig’. And that’s what you should name it.

We shouldn’t be doing this,” “No, we shouldn’t,” he agreed, thankfully not stopping. “I need to stay away from you. I don’t know what sorcery this is,” he whispered to her, his words floating over her face as he leaned closer, “but I have to stop.

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.

She slips into the seat at our table, refusing to look up at me. I reach for her hand, sending a shiver through me when our finger tips touch. She glances at me, her eyes filled with a feral fear that reaches into my depths, pulling on emotions I refuse to acknowledge. Things I can’t feel now. Won’t feel ever again.

The desperate piercing scream of horror echoed far above the sharpened tops of the trees wrapped in thin obsidian-transparent mist, and I startled jerkily, tripping again, and almost collapsed onto the cold moist ground.

I kinda looked like a wanna-be Goth chick, or an unfortunate Persian girl in a Gothic romance who was wasting away from Tuberculosis. But that was alright. Oz had mentioned he wasn't human. He was probably into that sort of thing.

The more you repress something, the stronger that desire is fueled.

It was enough to drive me mad. I was no longer myself and yet I was so much more me than I had ever been before. ~Katherine Demure

There is absolutely nothing monstrous about being a vampire. In fact, it's quite beautiful.

He who writes is the martyr, seen through the eyes of the unassuming doll.

Good evening, you poor little Orphans of a Loveless God. Good evening to you blood sucking fools.

She tasted like a Chateau Margaux, perfectly rounded, slightly plumy with an aftertaste of ripe berries.

Love destroys people. It’s emotional heroin. Not that I know much about shooting up.

I have told you, reader, that I have learnt to love Mr.Rochester. I could not unlove him now

For the sake of your bright eyes, Jem Merlyn.

For the readers who wait all year for spooky season: this one’s for you.

You take all the fun out of life for me, Nik. You know that?" Aiden- Blood Hunger (Deathless Night Series #1)

In those few words you've summed up my life - my reason for existence. It's you. Any pain I've suffered, the mistakes I've made, the path laid out for me have all led here - to you.

I’m sorry he died before you figured it out. For what it’s worth, I think you might’ve eventually, without me there to displace your bullshit onto. He was head over heels for you, and everyone knew but you, and maybe him. No, I think he knew.

Before I start a film or a play, I try to build a world in my mind. An imaginative world which the character lives in; and I create that with novels, with painting, with music, with films. I try and understand tone. Tone is so important. Is this a thriller, is this a Gothic romance, is this an action film, is this a love story? Then, once I understand that, I just jump into it. This might be like an incomplete way of describing it, but it's like I build a swimming pool, then I just dive in. Do you know what I mean?

Time is tick, tick, ticking away. How many souls will I capture today? Will they be a challenge or will they be given? Only time will tell as the clock keeps tick, tick, ticking. Your god has arrived with enough hatred for y’all, with enough evil for the big and small, so come one, come all. I will shred your souls and place them in my satchel, call you a settler and make you my peddler. Come one, come all, come stand behind your god. I will lead you into the darkness of Earth's end. Come one, come all, my wilted flowers, come claim your title, speak out and cheer it. Come one, come all, let’s have a ball, my wilted flowers . . . Sweet, Unconquerable Spirits.

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.

He kisses me again, folding me in his arms--the place I want to stay for a thousand years. When I first discovered Dream Town, I wasn't sure where I belonged, where my true home was. But now I know. Sometimes home is a town, a house with four walls. Other times, it's two hollow eyes in a skull, a skeleton without a heartbeat. It's here---not in Dream Town or Halloween Town---but in Jack's arms. Folded against this hollow, skeleton chest is where I belong. I let the tears stream down my face, I let them bind us together, salt and water and fabric and bone. Woven parts of ourselves that become one.

Jack pulls me back into his arms, as if he could absorb the pain and take it from me. And I know, I would do it all over again: I would leave Dream Town and never return a thousand times just to be here with Jack, to touch his face, to feel his ice-cold lips on mine, to have a life with him in this town. To stand beside him as Pumpkin Queen. This is the life I want. The one I'm willing to sacrifice everything for.

His love with Lucy bled from his heart as he slipped into a dark despair— a melancholy that only she could sever with her chaste voice and tender kisses. Now in an unreachable darkness, a blindness took hold. A blood lust that would drive him mad for five years hence.

He smirked. “Decision time, pretty lady... back to reality?” She touched his cheek. “Or down the rabbit hole?

Silver bullets and a stake in the heart But the cross still awakens my heart I'm the freak of nature that's all Darling it's not the way that you are

Vampires have the ability to control the mind of their prey." - Damian Blackwood, Mrs. Blackwood

I don’t know if I want to be free anymore.” said Coralie in a whisper, “Good, because I don’t know if I wish you to be.” - Damian Blackwood, Mrs. Blackwood

The vampire that I am doesn't stop at my fangs." - Damian Blackwood, Mrs. Blackwood

My dear lady, you have no idea just how scandalous I can be. ~Peter Viktor von Strassenberg, 1905

Are you baiting me, Miss Dantonville?" "I wouldn't dream of it!" "Oh, I believe you are! That's a dangerous game to play with a vampire.

Arsay should have been a vampyre. He loves the entire Gothic error, the décor hasn't changed since gargoyles sprung up all over Paris.

Moonseed Manor did not look like a place to live. Moonseed Manor looked like a place to die.

For once, she had an answer. "I am free." And then she turned to Gundry and let the hellhound have his feast.

You’re like the moon waxing into sight.

All she could see was her demise and it called out a tempting ruse, offering a suffering less potent than what sickened the living.

The air is thick, the stone is cold, These chains are rust, these years are old. Darkness lingers, gnaws, decays, A hollow tomb in endless days.

What beautiful hyacinths! I have just learnt to love a hyacinth. -- Catherine Morland

Back to the dark, my cursed throne, I bear her forth, I stand alone. Her breath is shallow, soft and dim, Her pulse a song—a fleeting hymn.

And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently flow upon my cheek.

We belong in the dark together.

Would You Notice Me" is a beautifully intense read. The imagery is engaging....”the Merlot waterfall” and “confetti’d parts” lines for instance, and the the voice of the poem as a whole.

I came from across the ocean and through the wilderness and landed here and found you hiding behind a tapestry. My fate was sealed at the sight of your stockinged feet. ~Viktor von Strassenberg

You expect me to tell the truth, but you’re lying to yourself,” Alek said. “You think you want me, but you don’t. You think I’m worth loving, but I’m not. You say you’ll never leave, but you will.

If one night you ask for my permission to release you so you will be forever free from me, know that I’ll also have the freedom to leave you and never come back.” - Damian Blackwood, Mrs. Blackwood

Cry no tears for us, my friend.” I pry at her fingers, panicking to be released in fear that she may drag me into death with her. She croaks again, “Lend no aches to the dreams of yesterday.” From the corpse of Warren, his greyish gums smack from whatever goo has settled in his mouth, “Allow the tide sweep free the bay.” Then together they sing in zombie choir, “And home the ships sailing send.

I can see how your mother would have a point. Having a debate with a politically minded woman can be intriguing and even entertaining but to share a house with her and have her always campaigning and protesting at the dinner table,” he slanted his gaze down toward me. “That could be very tiring indeed.

In the attempt to find the just measure of horror and terror, I came upon the writing of Carole Gill whose work revealed a whole new dimension to me. The figure of the gothic child was there. Stoker's horror was there. Along with the romance! At the heart of her writing one stumbles upon a genuine search for that darkness we lost with the loss of Stoker." ~Dr. Margarita Georgieva ~ Gothic Readings in The Dark

The existentialists' view of love is not romantic, because they do not believe in love as an abstract force or amorous sunset walks along the beach. However, Cox also said, "if your idea of romance is somewhat more gothic and stormy, full of heartache, yearning and the thwarted desire to possess breaking up, making up and breaking up again, tears before bedtime and tears in the rain, then maybe it is romantic".

There is also a waka poem Akio penned for me: Now I understand It is all so clear to me August wind, rain, sleet I stopped believing in love Until I saw the leaves fall Poetry is kind of our thing. Originally, we were mortal enemies. Akio drove me nuts with his schedules, his overall gothic-novel vibe, and his eight inches of height over me. But now, our couple dynamic is fun-loving princess and gruff former bodyguard turned promising pilot who only shows his soft side to those closest to him. It really works for me.

The fly that should be dead and the dog that should be dead in the house that should be dead, and the bride, who would be dead soon. It watched approvingly, appreciating the complexities—and fragilities—of life.

Memories of last night manifested slowly from the back of her brain, every new detail hammering her heart like a war drum: the flowers, the vodka, the persistent dream-like sensation, the closet, the outline of a stranger, the sex... and, most gut-wrenching of all, the sudden realization that he might still be here.

You know something. Life really is too short. We need to focus on the beautiful things in life, not their miseries. Life’s-end for one person doesn’t define them. It’s the memories that they make while they’re alive.

And now I should kiss you again, I think. Isn’t that how it’s done?” Startled, she put her hand to her lips. But their rough, cracked surfaces made the very prospect seem ludicrous. “Yes, I suppose—in a gothic romance. But if you kissed me now, no doubt my lip would split open, and I’d bleed on you.” His shout of laughter was quickly restrained. “Well, all right. Since you put it so romantically. Someplace else. Shall I be adventurous?

In her naïve imaginings, he had been like the tortured hero of a gothic romance, possessing a heart filled with dark passions borne from even darker tragedies. His gregarious charm was belied only by the shadows in his eyes, and in their clear amber depths she had thought she had seen a Byronic torment to which she might pose the balm. And she had been right about all of that, save for one crucial thing: He was not the hero. He was, in fact, the villain.

I can’t imagine feeling that way about someone,” she said. “I mean, building a house for them, and then burning parts of it to the ground when they die, and burying them beneath black flowers—” She broke off, glancing at him. “Who does that?” “My family,” he said.

These scenes,’ said Valancourt, at length, ‘soften the heart, like the notes of sweet music, and inspire that delicious melancholy which no person, who had felt it once, would resign for the gayest pleasures. They waken our best and purest feelings, disposing us to benevolence, pity, and friendship. Those whom I love — I always seem to love more in such an hour as this.’ His voice trembled, and he paused.

They thought I was troubled after noticing the cut marks I'd made on my arms and legs, a habit I'd picked up to impress cute girls in school. I'd carve a crush's name into my shoulder, or make slashes on my forearm to win their attention. The pain was intense, but it paid off.

Amelia envisaged that between York and the royal-infested Scottish Highlands there was a grimy wasteland of derelict cranes and abandoned mills and betrayed, yet still staunch, people. Oh and moorland, of course, vast tracts of brooding landscape under lowering skies, and across this heath strode brooding, lowering men intent on reaching their ancestral houses, where they were going to fling open doors and castigate orphaned yet resolute governesses. Or — preferably — the brooding, lowering men were on horseback, black horses with huge muscled haunches, glistening with sweat —

Sleep, or repose that deserved the name of sleep, was out of question. That room, in which her disturbed imagination had tormented her on her first arrival, was again the scene of agitated spirits and unquiet slumbers. Yet how different now the source of her inquietude from what it had been then; how mournfully superior in reality and substance.

She knew this wouldn't lead anywhere good, but she couldn't resist all the good she'd pass through before she got to the bad.

Blood slides from the sill and onto the wall, where it inches toward the floor. I'll let it stain, because it's exactly what he wanted: a mark on Vietnam.

She is art. And I'm her selfish aesthete; craving to keep her hidden from those who don't deserve to witness her ethereal beauty (Casmir Vaintera, Of Gods and Pain)

you ought not to consider poverty a crime.

Romance, I thought, was a poor replacement for freedom.

He fell at my feet, with words of love. . .with words of love in his dead mouth. . .

No matter what happens, I'm blessed beyond worth or measure to have heard your song and felt your love.

I’m pretty sure your house isn’t haunted,” he said. She shrugged. “Part of me hopes you’re wrong.

She was stubborn. She was evolving. She needed SOLITUDE like normal people needed exercise.

We're in high school. If it didn't come from the school cafeteria, we like it.

No human being could live in this wasted country, thought Mary, and remain like other people; the very children would be born twisted, like the blackened shrubs of broom, bent by the force of a wind that never ceased, blow as it would from east and west, from north and south. Their minds would be twisted, too, their thoughts evil, dwelling as they must amidst marshland and granite, harsh heather and crumbling stone.

Matthew shook his head. “Whoever said anything of women in the Victorian era being prim and proper apparently hadn’t met Maxine Fleming.” Tahatan chuckled. “I’m sure a publisher somewhere would make a nice fortune with putting this into print. The fact is, people tend to look back on bygone times through rose-colored glasses. All eras have encouraged values that are pushed on the surface, but in the end, people are still people.

I followed his outstretched hand . . . followed the man who was my dark angel, my guardian, friend, and father; followed him deeper into a kingdom where there was neither dawn nor sunset, into a timeless world of endless night.

He wipes away the tear streaming down my cotton cheekbone to my chin and looks at me like his own chest is about to fracture. And for a moment, I'm certain they should just bury us both here, at the center of the graveyard. Married and died on the same day. Unable to contain the unspeakable, awful, wondrous emotion breaking against our eyelids. The dreadful residents of Halloween Town applaud, tossing tiny dwarf spiders at our feet as we leave the cemetery, and the warmth in my chest feels like bats clamoring for a way out of my rib cage. Trying to break me apart. I am now Sally Skellington. The Pumpkin Queen. And I'm certain I will never again be as happy as I am right now.

The sublime signals the limits of rationality—the ‘sleep’ of reason—and was best communicated by obscurity. So in the same spirit as the recipes ‘to make a romance’, ‘seven types of obscurity’ could be proposed for a Gothic novel:

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed. —Jane Eyre From Gradesaver.com

A great deal; you are good to those who are good to you. It is all I ever desire to be. If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way; they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should - so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.

What would you rather have me do? Should I serve opium? Serve food? Serve myself? What else do you think I’m qualified for? I could serve my husband. Hope he doesn’t drink or smoke or gamble or beat me. Have four babies before I’m twenty-five and say I’m blessed if two live to adulthood. Bury the rest from starvation or miscarriage, illness or injury, or my heaven-blessed husband shaking one too hard when he gets home late and they won’t stop crying. You think that’s the better choice?

The beautiful things did hurt. And maybe I was a sucker for pain, because I wasn't ready to find out what would happen if it were to stop hurting. If they went away. If they left me here. I think that would hurt the most, more than never having left the belltower at all.

While disease had thus become an inhabitant of Lowood, and death its frequent visitor; while there was gloom and fear within its walls; while its rooms and passages steamed with hospital smells, the drug and the pastille striving vainly to overcome the effluvia of mortality, that bright May shone unclouded over the bold hills and beautiful woodland out of doors. Its garden, too, glowed with flowers: hollyhocks had sprung up tall as trees, lilies had opened, tulips and roses were in bloom; the borders of the little beds were gay with pink thrift and crimson double daisies; the sweetbriars gave out, morning and evening, their scent of spice and apples; and these fragrant treasures were all useless for most of the inmates of Lowood, except to furnish now and then a handful of herbs and blossoms to put in a coffin.

Foreboding” might have been the appropriate word. “Dread.” The PROMISE of fear. It was tangible fear... smellable... the stale odor soaking into the dirt and lingering in the windless jungle of dead branches and train tracks to nowhere; lovelier than angst, kinder than panic.

I know what you are,” I whispered. Adrian didn’t flinch. “Do you.” His voice was a low rasp. I reached into my clutch, pulled out a tiny shard of glass I’d kept from before—why, I didn’t even know—and without flinching, sliced my palm open. Blood welled instantly, hot and red. His nostrils flared. His eyes bled crimson. “You’re insane,” he growled, stepping back. “No,” I said, stepping forward. “I’m curious.” He moved in a blur, faster than I could blink, grabbing me by the throat—not hard enough to hurt, just enough to hold me still. His fangs had descended, sharp and glinting.

Because they were the weapon, and I was built to pardon their pain. Maybe in the end, that's what love was. Forgiveness. Undeniable, unsolicited, and at times unrequited. It was the ability to look past the pain despite all the hurt it could cause you because in the end you knew it could do the same for you.

She will have brown eyes that say everything I ever need to know without her having to speak. She will be beyond extraordinary. She is beyond extraordinary. I will give her everything she ever wanted. She will never have to be afraid or alone. She will always have me. I will never let anything happen to her.

You had a bad dream." Jack tenderly tucks a strand of bloodred hair behind my ear. "I've got you now, Sally. Through sweet dreams or nightmares, I've always got you." "Oh, Jack." I bury my face against his rib cage. "It didn't feel like a dream." As I sink into his hold, letting my twisted-up stuffing of cotton and crisp autumn leaves unravel back into place, I try to tell myself that he's right: It was only a dream. I may now be the queen of a land of nightmares-- but I come from a place of sweet dreams. And even though my life is happier now than I ever imagined, it seems that, even in slumber, I still can't find my place between those worlds.

Do not fear the ghosts in this house; they are the least of your worries. Personally I find the noises they make reassuring. The creaks and footsteps in the night, their little tricks of hiding things, or moving them, I find endearing, not upsettling. It makes the place feel so much more like a home. Inhabited. Apart from ghosts nothing lives here for long. No cats no mice, no flies, no dreams, no bats. Two days ago I saw a butterfly, a monarch I believe, which danced from room to room and perched on walls and waited near to me. There are no flowers in this empty place, and, scared the butterfly would starve, I forced a window wide, cupped my two hands around her fluttering self, feeling her wings kiss my palms so gentle, and put her out, and watched her fly away. I've little patience with the seasons here, but your arrival eased this winter's chill. Please, wander round. Explore it all you wish. I've broken with tradition on some points. If there is one locked room here, you'll never know. You'll not find in the cellar's fireplace old bones or hair. You'll find no blood. Regard: just tools, a washing-machine, a drier, a water-heater, and a chain of keys. Nothing that can alarm you. Nothing dark. I may be grim, perhaps, but only just as grim as any man who suffered such affairs. Misfortune, carelessness or pain, what matters is the loss. You'll see the heartbreak linger in my eyes, and dream of making me forget what came before you walked into the hallway of this house. Bringing a little summer in your glance, and with your smile. While you are here, of course, you will hear the ghosts, always a room away, and you may wake beside me in the night, knowing that there's a space without a door, knowing that there's a place that's locked but isn't there. Hearing them scuffle, echo, thump and pound. If you are wise you'll run into the night, fluttering away into the cold, wearing perhaps the laciest of shifts. The lane's hard flints will cut your feet all bloody as you run, so, if I wished, I could just follow you, tasting the blood and oceans of your tears. I'll wait instead, here in my private place, and soon I'll put a candle in the window, love, to light your way back home. The world flutters like insects. I think this is how I shall remember you, my head between the white swell of your breasts, listening to the chambers of your heart.

Marriage could hardly be like the passionate romances one read about in books. It seemed to her, in fact, a rotten deal. Men would be solicitous and well behaved when they courted a woman, asking her out to parties and sending her flowers, but once they married, the flowers wilted. You didn’t have married men posting love letters to their wives.

Noemi wondered if High Place had robbed her of her illusions, or if they were meant to be shattered all along. Marriage could hardly be like the passionate romances one read about in books. It seemed to her, in fact, a rotten deal. Men would be solicitous and well behaved when they courted a woman, asking her out to parties and sending her flowers, but once they married. the flowers wilted. You didn't have married men posting love letters to their wives. That's why Noemí tended to cycle through admirers. She worried a man would be briefly impressed with her luster, only to lose interest later on. There was also the excitement of the chase, the delight that flew through her veins when she knew a suitor was bewitched with her. Besides, boys her age were dull, always talking about the parties they had been to the previous week or the one they were planning to go to the week after. Easy, shallow men. Yet the thought of anyone more substantial made her nervous, for she was trapped between competing de sires, a desire for a more meaningful connection and the desire to never change. She wished for eternal youth and endless merriment.

The boy was there too, stumbling through the living room horde and passing out magic mushrooms from a paper bag. His eyeballs sparkled inside gaping, play-dough sockets while his limbs hung gaunt and exhausted from eight straight days of self-medicating fear. Another boy in a black tee pinched some mushroom flakes from his bag, nodded his thanks, and mouthed the word “bro” like blowing a man kiss.

I like to say the idea of Phantasma came to me all at once, hitting me like a ton of bricks one cloudy afternoon in November 2021, but truly, my experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder has been building to this story for a very long time. During the process of brainstorming the sort of adult romance I wanted to debut with, I was going through a period where my obsessive-compulsive tendencies were flaring up more than usual and the voices in my head were getting a little too bold. To my friends, these compulsions were alarming little anecdotes over lunch—‘that sounds like a horror movie’ one of them said (affectionately)—which is funny because, to me, someone who has lived with OCD my entire life, it was just another day of being unfazed by the increasingly creative scenarios my mind likes to conjure. OCD has such a wide range of symptoms that it makes every person’s experience with it different. Unfortunately, it has also become a commonly misused term conflated with the idea of being overly neat and clean, when in reality a lot of people with OCD have much darker symptoms. In my experience this has made explaining the real effects of OCD very hard as well as making it more difficult for people to regard the condition seriously. It’s so important to me to convey, with the utmost sincerity, that I know people are not doing this to be malicious! Because of the misuse of the term, however, some of the ways this disorder is shown in this book may come off as exaggerated or dramatic—but the details of Ophelia’s OCD are drawn directly from experiences that I, or someone I know who shares my condition, have had first-hand. And it’s still only a fraction of the symptoms we live with daily. Ophelia’s story is a love letter to my journey of getting comfortable being in my own head (as well as my adoration for Gothic aesthetics and hot ghosts). And while her experience with OCD, my experience with OCD, might look a lot different to someone else’s, I hope that the same message rings clear: struggling with your mental health does not make you unworthy of love. And I hope the people you surround yourself with are the sort of people who know that, too.

I’m trying to be an adult. I’m trying to be responsible. I’m trying not to call home crying. But it’s hard. It’s hard when every morning feels like a hangover. It’s hard when I hear voices every time I go to sleep. It’s hard when the only thing that would make me feel better is to crawl in bed with the one person who truly knows me, but I’m more afraid of her than the bears or the perverts or whoever the hell visits her when I’m away.

“In the Victorian age, he would have been an opium addict. A portrait of Byronic tragedy and Gothic ruin. In the Medieval period, he would have glutted himself on the blood lust and the religious fervor of the Crusades, falling on the twin pyres of courtly love and the denial of self-abstention. In the 1950s, it was quaint Americana, chain-smoking, and drinking. Fast cars, rock music, and fucking,” he spat the word. “He was dying when I turned him. I think he knew.

Lily Chadwick knew there was something different about the fiercely scowling gentleman the first moment she saw him. She could feel it. The instant their gazes met, caught, held, something skittered across her skin like a rain of white sparks. It entered her bloodstream, heating her from the inside until her breath became stilted and her knees went alarmingly weak. He stared at her from beneath a brow drawn low in a forbidding expression. His eyes were so dark, even the light of the glittering ballroom could not be reflected there. The angles of his face were hard, his jaw sharply defined, and he held his mouth in a harsh line that attempted to harden the full curve of his lower lip but didn't quite manage it. Lily tried to glance away demurely, but she couldn't seem to manage. She felt a flutter that became a tightening in her belly. Her heart stopped, skipped a few beats, then started up again in a frantic rhythm as he just kept watching her. Despite his severe, aloof appearance, something about him reached out to her, touching her with an intrinsic sort of recognition. It left her feeling as though she stood in the heart of a firestorm. She sensed with a certainty beyond rational explanation that his unyielding manner was a facade, as if he were a hero in some gothic novel. There was passion in him. She felt it in every quickened, prey-like breath she took while frozen under his intent stare. The silent interaction between them was becoming more inappropriate by the minute, yet she could not compel herself to break away. As though caught in an invisible trap, she stared back at him while her hands began to sweat and her stomach trembled.

In my time,” he continues, voice low, “sanctity was measured by suffering. Those saints that abstained from the pleasures of life, fasted to starvation, mortified their flesh, drank the blood of the wounded—it was only they who saw the eyes of God, it was only through their agony that they were touched by true divinity, enraptured by their own faith.” “I… I’m not a saint, Silas.” Her eyes meet his in a gaze that’s wrapped up in the promise for everything she’s always denied herself. The promise of temptation for the taste of that forbidden fruit, a single bite all it takes for irreversible expulsion, for an eternal fall from grace. “I never said you were.” The warmth of his breath is so close to her own, heat mingling, pulses flush close. “Then what are you saying?” “That I am,” he answers. “I found God. And I’m looking into her eyes.

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.

The marine underworld stretched below the ship and embodied many secrets. The disappearance of Olga had become one of the mysteries that would remain with Stefania and her family. The disappearance of her baby sister and sudden departure from her home had taught the ten-year-old that life was filled with uncertainties. But she was willing to forget that for a little while. She jumped down from the barrel and headed toward Liam, Felix, and the other shipmates. They would sing shanties and talk of the constellations, the sea, its creatures, and the legends. It would get her through another night. La Suerte was the only stability for her passengers with the infinite unknown all around them. The waters of the sea, the world below the surface, and the sky that stretched beyond the horizon was a representation of the limitless possibilites and dangers awaiting those aboard.

Noemí wondered if High Place had robbed her of her illusions, or if they were meant to be shattered all along. Marriage could hardly be like the passionate romances one read about in books. It seemed to her, in fact, a rotten deal. Men would be solicitous and well behaved when they courted a woman, asking her out to parties and sending her flowers, but once they married, the flowers wilted. You didn’t have married men posting love letters to their wives. That’s why Noemí tended to cycle through admirers. She worried a man would be briefly impressed with her luster, only to lose interest later on. There was also the excitement of the chase, the delight that flew through her veins when she knew a suitor was bewitched with her. Besides, boys her age were dull, always talking about the parties they had been to the previous week or the one they were planning to go to the week after. Easy, shallow men.

Marriage could hardly be like the passionate romances one read about in books. It seemed to her, in fact, a rotten deal. Men would be solicitous and well behaved when they courted a woman, asking her out to parties and sending her flowers, but once they married, the flowers wilted. You didn’t have married men posting love letters to their wives. That’s why Noemí tended to cycle through admirers. She worried a man would be briefly impressed with her luster, only to lose interest later on. There was also the excitement of the chase, the delight that flew through her veins when she knew a suitor was bewitched with her. Besides, boys her age were dull, always talking about the parties they had been to the previous week or the one they were planning to go to the week after. Easy, shallow men. Yet the thought of anyone more substantial made her nervous, for she was trapped between competing desires, a desire for a more meaningful connection and the desire to never change. She wished for eternal youth and endless merriment.