Gothic Quotes - Page 3

• We must note carefully what distinction there is between a healthy and a diseased love of change; for as it was in healthy love of change that the Gothic architecture rose, it was partly in consequence of diseased love of change that it was destroyed.

  John Ruskin

  Rose, Healthy, Architecture

  John Ruskin (1854). “On the Nature of Gothic Architecture: And Herein of the True Functions of the Workman in Art ...”, p.16

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Tyson Chandler

  Pieces, Goth

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  13 Copy quote

• What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Thinking, Cities, Looks

  Mohsin Hamid (2007). “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, p.3, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What the world needs right now... a good, artistic, gothic, terrifying scare

  Iggy Pop

  Scare, Needs, World

  23 Copy quote

• The apartments of the rich are cabinets of curiosities: a conglomeration of classical antiquity, gothic, renaissance; Louis XIII... Something from every century but our own, a predicament that has arisen in no other period... so that we seem to be subsisting on the ruins of the past, as if the end of the world were near.

  Alfred de Musset

  Past, Curiosity, World

  "Confession d'un Enfant du Siécle". Book by Alfred de Musset, 1836.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• For me black is not dark, it's poetic. I don't think of gothic I think of classic - it's a big difference.

  Ann Demeulemeester

  Dark, Thinking, Differences

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Derek Landy

  Romance, Sound, Cain

  10 Copy quote

• The grandeur of the Institute never failed to impress Magnus - the way it towered high and mighty above everything else, timeless and unmoving in its Gothic disapproval of all that was modern and changeable.

  Cassandra Clare

  Way, Modern, Timeless

  Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson (2015). “The Bane Chronicles”, p.224, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.

  Heidi Julavits

  Girl, Mother, Running

  Heidi Julavits (2008). “The Uses of Enchantment”, p.14, Anchor

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Maybe we were being a bit unrealistic, but we had this hope that if we could just get into the Ivy League, everything would be set. We dreamed of Gothic libraries and leafy green quads and romantic dorms with fireplaces and guys who were not only cute but also smart and charming, and, quite possibly, British. In college, we believed, we’d finally find our people.

  Sarah Strohmeyer

  Cute, Smart, College

  Sarah Strohmeyer (2012). “Smart Girls Get What They Want”, p.5, Harper Collins

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Below are some quotations along these lines. Select a quote for your Gothic Myspace layout or contribute one of your own.

  Laura Ramirez

  Love, Lines, Select

  4 Copy quote

• I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make dspair pause. For in truth, we who are creatures of impulse, are creatures of despair.

  Joseph Conrad

  Love, Men, Despair

  "Chance". Book by Joseph Conrad, part I, ch. 6, 1913.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Melrose is the finest remaining specimen of Gothic architecture in Scotland. Some of the sculptured flowers in the cloister arches are remarkably beautiful and delicate, and the two windows - the south and east oriels - are of a lightness and grace of execution really surprising.

  Bayard Taylor

  Beautiful, Flower, Scotland

  Bayard Taylor (1875). “Views A-foot: Or, Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff”, p.69

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Junior high is so much worse than high school because at least in high school different is more accepted, celebrated actually: all the girls with blue hair and gothic Hello Kitty backpacks.

  Nikki Reed

  Girl, School, Hair

  55 Copy quote

• I never realised that the Edinburgh skyline was so interesting - it's gothic and very urban and there's a lot of church spires and old brownstone buildings.

  Jamie Bell

  Interesting, Church, Edinburgh

  "Hallam Foe - Jamie Bell interview" by Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I love puffins. They are small, round gothic birds, and their babies are called pufflings.

  Caitlin Moran

  Baby, Bird, Puffins

  54 Copy quote

• There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Night, Reality

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.92, Wordsworth Editions

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough to live it.

  Chaim Potok

  Self, Needs, Boring

  4 Copy quote

• Every time the phone rang, my heart jumped. Was it Alexander? And when it wasn't him my heart would break into a million pieces. It had been two longs days since I had seen my Gothic mate. I was so preoccupied with Alexander, dreaming of the next time we'd be together, nothing else mattered. I didn't wash the spot where his tender love lips had pressed against my flesh. I was acting like I was straight out of a Gidget movie! What had happened to me? I was losing my edge! For the first time in my life I was really afraid. Afraid of never seeing him again and afraid of being rejected.

  Ellen Schreiber

  Dream, Heart, Phones

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Wall, Branches, Classic

  12 Copy quote

• Each thing I do, I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days pass - -a blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral. Through the windows of my speeding car I see all that I love falling away: books unread, jokes untold, landscapes unvisited.

  Stephen Dobyns

  Book, Fall, Stock Car Racing

  Stephen Dobyns, “Pursuit”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there... I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity... Anyway, I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in the darkening summer grass until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then.

  Richard Brautigan

  Summer, War, Dark

  19 Copy quote

• Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. (Dreams In The Witch-House)

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Dream, Reality, House

  H. P. Lovecraft (2017). “Dreams in the Witch House”, p.3, BookRix

  11 Copy quote

  Show source