Gothic Quotes - Page 4

• 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

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• 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

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• 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”

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• 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

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• I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.

  Emily Bronte

  Heathcliff, Destruction, Lost

  Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte (2009). “The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.597, Penguin

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• It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

  John Ruskin

  School, Mind, Architecture

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• On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ?

  Umberto Eco

  Latin, Italian, Reflection

  Umberto Eco (2014). “The Name of the Rose”, p.4, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Moths are the ones that freak me out. It's something to do with the way that, if they get squashed, they turn to dust. There's something very wrong about that. It all feels a bit Gothic.

  David Tennant

  Dust, Way, Freak

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• I love the gothic literature. It always has such great stories with characters bigger than life and the stakes are always high. And because there's always a wolf at the door, the emotions are high; the romance, the sexuality, friendships, and relationships. You don't know if the guy kissing you one minute is going to bite you the next. This heightens all of the sensibilities and emotions, and therefore, it sings to me. And that's where the music comes from.

  Frank Wildhorn

  Character, Kissing, Doors

  Interview with Pati Buehler, www.broadwayworld.com. June 13, 2004.

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• When the theater is gothic it matches the sensibility of the show. It's also very intimate. The audience is very close to the performers. The show is scary and the scary stuff always works best with an intimacy with the audience. And the show is erotic, and I think erotic always works best when it's close to the audience, as well.

  Frank Wildhorn

  Thinking, Scary, Erotic

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• [On New York:] ... a city rose before me. It was narrow and tall like a gothic temple, surrounded by water, and ... it suddenly appeared, as if with a slight push it detached itself out of the invisible into the visible.

  Nina Berberova

  New York, Cities, Water

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• Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

  Kenneth Clark

  Men, Gdp, Opera

  Kenneth Clark, British Broadcasting Corporation (1970). “Civilization”, London : British Broadcasting Corporation

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• Gargoyles were the complement to saints; Leonardo's caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty. And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away. Leonardo was less concerned than his Gothic predecessors with the ethereal parts of our nature, and so his caricatures, in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic.

  Kenneth Clark

  Passion, Animal, Expression

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• Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque.

  Frank Wedekind

  Kitsch, Form, Rococo

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• In the Spanish people there is a mixture of Gothic, Frankish and Moorish blood. One can speak of the Spaniard as one would speak of a brave anarchist. The Arabian epoch-the Arabs look down on the Turks as they do on dogs-was the most cultured, the most intellectual and in every way best and happiest epoch in Spanish history. It was followed by the period of the persecutions with its unceasing atrocities.

  Adolf Hitler

  Dog, Blood, People

  Adolf Hitler (1953). “Secret conversations, 1941-1944”

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• The Gothic idea that we were to look backwards instead of forwards for the improvement of the human mind, and to recur to the annals of our ancestors for what is most perfect in government, in religion and in learning, is worthy of those bigots in religion and government by whom it has been recommended, and whose purposes it would answer. But it is not an idea which this country will endure.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Ideas, Government

  Thomas Jefferson (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”, p.318

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• Your machinery is beautiful. Your society people have apologized to me for the envious ridicule with which your newspapers have referred to me. Your newspapers are comic but never amusing. Your Water Tower is a castellated monstrosity with pepperboxes stuck all over it. I am amazed that any people could so abuse Gothic art and make a structure not like a water tower but like a tower of a medieval castle. It should be torn down. It is a shame to spend so much money on buildings with such an unsatisfactory result. Your city looks positively dreary.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Art, Cities

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• I had a gothic phase, and now I'm more edgy chic.

  Ashley Benson

  Phases, Chic, Edgy

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The praise of a civilized world is justly due to Christianity;—war, by the influence of the humane principles of that religion, has been stripped of half its horrors. The French renounce Christianity, and they relapse into barbarism;—war resumes the same hideous and savage form which it wore in the ages of Gothic and Roman violence.

  Alexander Hamilton

  War, Age, Violence

  Alexander Hamilton (1904). “The Works of Alexander Hamilton”

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• With James Reese’s vivid and chilling novel, readers will gain a whole new appreciation of two gothic landmarks, Dracula and Jack the Ripper. Not only does The Dracula Dossier grip us with its fast paced hunt for history’s most notorious killer, it also enchants us with sophisticated and lyrical recreations of its unique period and strong characters. A daring achievement.

  Matthew Pearl

  Appreciation, Strong, Character

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• Nico was gothic, but she was Mary Shelley gothic to everyone else's Hammer horror film gothic. They both did Frankenstein, but Nico's was real.

  Peter Murphy

  Real, Hammers, Horror

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• No creaking gates, no gothic towers, no shuttered windows. Yet for the past ten months this house has been the focus of an astonishing barrage of supernatural activity.

  Michael Parkinson

  Halloween, Past, Focus

  "Ghostwatch", www.imdb.com. 1992.

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• What the Londoner sees in his mind's eye is that cluster of towers and pinnacles seen from Pentonville Hill and outlined against a foggy sunset, and the great arc of Barlow's train shed gaping to devour incoming engines, and the sudden burst of exuberant Gothic of the hotel seen from gloomy Judd Street.

  John Betjeman

  Sunset, Eye, Mind

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• The mighty edifice of Government science dominated the scene in the middle of the 20th century as a Gothic cathedral dominated a 13th century landscape. The work of many hands over many years, it universally inspired admiration, wonder and fear.

  A. Hunter Dupree

  Hard Work, Science, Government

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• Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere.

  Andrea Barrett

  Dark, Evil, Mysterious

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