Gothic Quotes - Page 2

• I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.

  John McGahern

  Printed Word, Church, Poor

  "The whole world in a community" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. January 5, 2002.

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• I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

  Roland Barthes

  Passion, Mean, Thinking

  Mythologies "La Nouvelle Citroen" (1957) (translation by Annette Lavers)

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• Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list -- the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation.

  Karl Marx

  Museums, Civilization, Dancer

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1976). “Collected works”

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• Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

  George Santayana

  Lovely, Promise, Ruins

  George Santayana (1944). “Persons and Places”

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• Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably useless.

  H. L. Mencken

  Beautiful, Half, Useless

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• Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Light, Culture, Architecture

  Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, Elena Lamberti, Dominique Scheffel-Dunand (2011). “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man”, p.329, University of Toronto Press

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• I'm not really into gothic music, it's not really my type of scene but each to their own. I listen to pretty much anything.

  Richard Fleeshman

  Scene, Type

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• Well, Italy had been overrun by the War, there had practically been civil war, north and south of the Gothic Line, heavy bombing, the northern industrial cities had been bombed heavily and we had political disorder before 1948.

  Gianni Agnelli

  War, Cities, Political

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• If you look at Gothic detailing right down to the bottom of a column or the capital of a column, it's a small version of the whole building; that's why, like dating the backbones of a dinosaur, a good historian can look at a detail of a Gothic building and tell you exactly what the rest of the building was, and infer the whole from the parts.

  Charles Jencks

  Dating, Details, Looks

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• I'm not sure what the proper label might be, or the most accurate one, but someone once called my stuff Southern Ohio Gothic and I thought that was fair.

  Donald Ray Pollock

  Ohio, Southern, Labels

  Source: therumpus.net

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• But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.

  Seth Grahame-Smith

  Writing, Dark, Wicked

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• There is a place in men's lives where pictures do in fact bleed, ghosts gibber and shriek, maidens run forever through mysterious landscapes from nameless foes; that place is, of course, the world of dreams and of the repressed guilts and fears that motivate them [i.e., the unconscious]. This world the dogmatic optimism and shallow psychology of the Age of Reason had denied; and yet this world it is the final, perhaps the essential, purpose of the gothic romance to assert.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Running, Dream, Men

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• I'm not so fond of the sort of science fiction that isn't really science fiction but is sometimes thought to be - Gothic princesses and white horses and bats and castles and things.

  Richard Dawkins

  Horse, Princess, White

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudi's Gothic architecture, my love of gold - there is a common denominator in all of it: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of mankind.

  Salvador Dali

  Children, Heart, Perfection

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• Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

  Goldwin Smith

  Religious, Age, Church

  Goldwin Smith (1881). “Lectures and Essays”, New York : Macmillan

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• Before that I wanted to be a magazine illustrator - I probably would have painted Gothic scenes.

  Ira Levin

  Magazines, Scene, Wanted

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• Preacher is a book that somehow allows me time by its settling on it's characters, that sort of modern gothic western feel. You're not likely to see the boat veering too far from that.

  Garth Ennis

  Book, Character, Literature

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• My wife and I battle over home decor. My style goes from Gothic to Baroque. Hers is minimalist.

  Joe Bastianich

  Home, Wife, Style

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• I wouldn't consider myself Goth, but I love Gothic pieces.

  Tyson Chandler

  Pieces, Goth

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• I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Spiritual, Exercise, Imagination

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• 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.

  Bob Dylan

  Beautiful, Art, Moving

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• Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.

  Russell Kirk

  Organization, Perfect, Mind

  Russell Kirk (1963). “Confessions of a bohemian Tory: episodes and reflections of a vagrant career”

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• The feat of superbly imitating a muscle, as Michelangelo did, or a face, as Raphael did, created neither progress nor a hierarchy in art. Because these artists of the sixteenth century imitated human forms, they were not superior to the artists of the high periods of Egyptian, Chaldean, Indochinese, Roman, and Gothic art who interpreted and stylized form but did not imitate it.

  Fernand Leger

  Art, Progress, Faces

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• Seldom is a Gothic head more beautiful than when broken.

  Andre Malraux

  Beautiful, Broken

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• At the time Gothic cathedrals were designed, most people lived in dark huts, so just walking into a space vastly larger than what they were habituated to, lit by stained glass windows, was literally awe-inspiring. Today, we're not as impressed by big buildings, so we have to go to very large mountains to experience that 'diminutive effect.'

  Michael Persinger

  Dark, Glasses, Space

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