Could it have been Love that made us immortal?
I ask you ancient silver moons of old for I am alone,
Answer me I beg! For all the golden suns are deaf and blind to my plea, To my plea
To my beloved who sits quietly in this forgotten tomb,
Damn the worm! You will not kiss my love wan and cold tenderly.
–CHARLIE’S DREAM
Intelligence without the soul to balance it must be of necessity evil—JOHN STEINBECK (The Affair at 7 Rue de M–)
When the Horror passing speech
Hunted us along,
Each laid hold on each, and each
Found the other strong.
In the teeth of things forbid
And reason overthrown,
Helen stood by me, she did,
Helen all alone.
–Rudyard Kipling
From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this
sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.
–Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow)
Ancient purple eyes see and comprehend,
Countless fires carved across your cosmic plains,
Whisper to me, tell me all that I have sought for in vain,
Before my mortal quest has come to an eternal end.
Let me see, let me feel the Universe at my eternal end!
–PURPLE IMMORTAL
A horror that was more than horror, a fear that was beyond fear, petrified all my faculties and I felt as if I was weighted down by some ineluctable and insupportable burden of nightmare. –Clark Ashton Smith (The Ninth Skeleton)
‘No. The face of a dark, remarkable-looking man, in black, with black hair and a grey moustache – a handsome man except for a reserved and secret air. Not a face she ever saw, or at all like a face she ever saw. Doing nothing in the dream but looking at her fixedly, out of darkness.’–CHARLES DICKENS (To Be Read At Dusk)
“I be as much ashamed as you be, I think,” said Mrs. Wise, and she leered at the pretty, shy-faced girl. Their eyes met and their eyes laughed at one another. –Arthur Machen (Witchcraft)
KING OF THE GARGOYLE album is roaring away!!!
‘He was so different from other men’.
—Robert Bloch
Some of you—only a few, I confess—believe in the immortality of the soul, and in apparitions which you have not the honesty to call ghosts. –Ambrose Bierce (A Diagnosis of Death)
The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and chuckled till he cried. —Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)
Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man’s. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal! –Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)
‘Now the web had filled the entire tomb. It ran and glistened with a hundred changing hues, it dripped with glories drawn from the spectrum of dissolution. It bloomed with ghostly blossoms, and foliages that grew and faded as if by necromancy. The eyes of Grotara were blinded; more and more he was meshed in the weird web. Unearthly, chill as the fingers of death, its gossamers clung and quivered upon his face and hands.’ –Clark Ashton Smith (The Weaver in the Vault)
‘“None have understood it, not even those who experience the like. It is a chillness, a want of earnestness, a feeling as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor, a haunting perception of unreality! Thus seeming to possess all that other men have, all that men aim at, I have really possessed nothing, neither joy nor griefs. All things, all persons,—as was truly said to me at this table long and long ago,—have been like shadows flickering on the wall. It was so with my wife and children, with those who seemed my friends: it is so with yourselves, whom I see now before one. Neither have I myself any real existence, but am a shadow like the rest.’
–Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Christmas Banquet)
Jeffrey LeBlanc 