Svengali Quotes

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

Nope. You know what, Thom, I can't do this-this, like, Svengali, don't-say-what-I-mean and definitely don't-let-anyone-see-I-have-feelings crap anymore. I fucking love you, okay?

He's sort of a Svengali... It means someone who's manipulative. More than that: somebody who makes you think that you need him in order to accomplish anything.

The Fox News network, especially opinion broadcaster Sean Hannity, had a Svengali-like influence on Trump that Rosenstein privately labeled “malicious.” Too many right-wing nuts had influence. He also found no comfort or credibility with mainstream media reporters, who he believed were prisoners of their partisan sources.

character. And I’ll tell you, it outweighed anything I’d ever done.” “What had she done?” I ask. “Shoplifting,” says Tam. There is a silence. “People have their own little guilt trips,” says Tam. “They look around. ‘Who’s a beast? Who’s a pedo?’ Now it’s on my record for the rest of my life. If I want to go into business, I have to state that I was done for lewd and libidinous. Gross indecency. People think, ‘Oh my God! He must have been crawling about in a nursery.’” “Can I ask about the boys who live here?” I say. “What do they do?” “They clean up,” he replies, a little sharply. “They feed the dogs. They take them for walks. They help me with my property business. They are eighteen years of age, and I don’t have a relationship with them. You can interview them until the cows come home. Maybe I just like nice people floating about. We don’t have orgies. There’s no swinging from the chandeliers. Even if there was,” he adds, “it would be legal.” Tam believes he was targeted because of his fame, because he was a celebrity Svengali. He blames his arrest, then, on the pop business. And now he is out of it. He has become a property millionaire, with forty flats in Edinburgh’s

And, ach! what a beautiful skeleton you will make! And very soon, too, because you do not smile on your madly loving Svengali. You burn his letters without reading them! You shall have a nice little mahogany glass case all to yourself in the museum of the École de Médecine, and Svengali shall come in his new fur-lined coat, smoking his big cigar of the Havana, and push the dirty carabins* out of the way, and look through the holes of your eyes into your stupid empty skull, and up the nostrils of your high, bony sounding-board of a nose without either a tip or a lip to it, and into the roof of your big mouth, with your thirty-two big English teeth, and between your big ribs into your big chest, where the big leather lungs used to be, and say, “Ach! what a pity she had no more music in her than a big tom-cat!” And then he will look all down your bones to your poor crumbling feet, and say, “Ach! what a fool she was not to answer Svengali’s letters!

But you are not listening, sapperment! great big she-fool that you are—sheep’s-head! Dummkopf! Donnerwetter! you are looking at the chimney-pots when Svengali talks! Look a little lower down between the houses, on the other side of the river! There is a little ugly grey building there, and inside are eight slanting slabs of brass, all of a row, like beds in a school dormitory, and one fine day you shall lie asleep on one of those slabs—you, Drilpy, who would not listen to Svengali, and therefore lost him! … And over the middle of you will be a little leather apron, and over your head a little brass tap, and all day long and all night the cold water shall trickle, trickle, trickle all the way down your beautiful white body to your beautiful white feet till they turn green, and your poor, damp, draggled, muddy rags will hang above you from the ceiling for your friends to know you by; drip, drip, drip! But you will have no friends…. ‘And people of all sorts, strangers, will stare at you through the big plate-glass window—Englanders,

That’s a trilby,” I said, referring to Mr. Mitchell’s hat and trying to show off at least some expertise. “Named from du Maurier’s novel, later made into a play,” said Oscar. “It was a style worn on stage.” “You mean Rebecca?” “No, Rosemary. George du Maurier’s Trilby. Not Daphne. That was his granddaughter. Now, Trilby also introduced into common usage the name Svengali. You see, it’s a story about power, about control . . .

Keen observations of a man’s character are often more reliable indicators of the facts than any version of truth a Svengali might try to peddle.

Trump loves to dispense nicknames, so we’ve got one for him: Shameless Svengali. Heck, it could be a lot worse . . . We’re being soft on him.

In Buddhist art, the portrayals of the Buddha are suffused with shanta rasa, a sense of transcendental peace, as are the Hindu depictions of Lord Shiva in meditation. One movie is brought to mind that strikes me as a yogic parable—The Truman Show. It seems to me reminiscent of the life of the Buddha, though told in a curious way. Truman’s entire life is a television show. Unknown to him, the community where he lives is actually a giant stage set and all the people in his life—including his wife and co-workers—are actors. People in the outside world avidly follow Truman’s every move, and everything is under the control of a Svengali-like director, of whom Truman is unaware. Truman’s controlled environment is like the Buddha’s. Both were shielded from the truth since birth. As cracks in the edifice of untruth start to appear they begin to wake up. They look around and inquire, ‘What’s going on?’ In a great leap both leave their lives and, risking everything, go through a doorway into the unknown. Of course, while the Buddha went through the door that led to enlightenment, Truman went through the door that led to the backlot of a movie studio. Both stories are parables of our soul’s journey of awakening. We discover that things are completely different from the way we thought, and we wake up to a new reality. But we can only follow Truman to the point where he makes that heroic choice. That is his enlightenment.

Svengali Girl (After Simon Says) Svengali girl says, ‘You can’t wear white, it makes you look fat.’ So we all wear black whilst she wears white. Svengali girl says, ‘We aren’t talking to the new girl, she’s weird.’ So we hurt this girl who did no wrong but is brand new to old ways. Svengali girl says, ‘If you are poor, you can’t hang out with us.’ So we all start putting value on saving face rather than on who we are. Svengali girl says, ‘I know you like him, but he’s out of your league.’ And we obediently stop liking him so she can date him. Svengali girl says, ‘Those shorts are too small for you.’ And we watch her buy them for herself instead. Svengali girl says ‘You’d be pretty if you had nicer eyes.’ And we learn to look at the ground when talking. Svengali girl is hurt when you call her cruel. She tells you she’s the only one who cares about you. She quietly threatens she will break you. She whispers rumours to hold you hostage. Who says women are too soft to know how to be vicious? We can do the most violent things to each other whilst making hardly a sound.

Nearly every horror theme and twist of plot is prefigured in these one-reel, seven- to eight-minute experiments of early filmmakers. Here are the seeds of feature-length horror subjects to come—murder, madness, curses, black magic, vampires, ghosts, mummies, werewolves, monsters, giant insects, demons, telepathy, time travel, waxworks, chambers of horrors, and even the perils of hypnosis and mind control (George du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby, featuring the evil mesmerist Svengali, was a bestseller, and was adapted many times for film).

Everyone saw the same act that I saw, but then nobody saw it the way I saw. In my mind this was the genius spoof of Bruce Springsteen that the world so desperately needed. The hyperbolic lyrics about motorcycles and switchblades, the simple triads of the music, the melodrama, the mysterious Svengali at the piano, all fronted not by a hunky denim clad stud but a 250 pound wild man whose head might explode any second. I was sold.

Her former suitor having been none other then Oscar Wilde, Florence had effectively captured the imaginations of the creators of Svengali, Dracula, and Dorian Gray. ... Rarely, if ever, has a woman been the focus of quite so much literary demonism.

When you overgeneralize, this is performing the mental equivalent of Svengali. You arbitrarily conclude that one thing that happened to you once will occur over and over again, will multiply like the Jack of Spades. Since what happened is invariably unpleasant, you feel upset.