Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning. ― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Vintage, January 1,… Continue reading Angela Carter
Red Red was your colour.If not red, then white. But redWas what you wrapped around you.Blood-red. Was it blood?Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?Haematite to make immortalThe precious heirloom bones, the family bones. When you had your way finallyOur room was red. A judgement chamber.Shut casket for gems. The carpet of bloodPatterned with darkenings,… Continue reading Ted Hughes
Every lover is, in his heart, a madman, and, in his head, a minstrel. — Neil Gaiman, Stardust (William Morrow; Reprint edition, October 30, 2012) Originally published January 1, 1998.
“The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.” ― China Miéville, Perdido Street Station (Macmillian; 1ST edition, January 1, 2001)
It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. — G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Ignatius Press; First edition, June 19, 1995)
[W]e are all as full of echoes as a rocky wood–echoes of the past, reflex echoes of the future, and echoes of the soil (these last reverberating through our filmiest dreams, like the sound of thunder in a blossoming orchard). — Mary Webb, Gone to Earth (Constable, 1917)
I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory. — Lawrence Durrell, Justine, Book 1 of The Alexandria Quartet (Faber & Faber, 2020)
Poetry can repair no loss but it defies that the space which separates and it does this by continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered. — John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos (Bloomsbury Paperbacks,2014)
I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city. ― Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (Andesite Press, August 8, 2015)
Upon the forehead of humanityall its more ponderous andbulky worth is friendship …But at the tip top, there hangsby unseen film an orbed drop of light.—And that is love. — David Lean, Eric Ambler, & Stanley Haynes, from the screenplay Passionate Friends, based on the novel by H.G. Wells (General Films, 1949)
The Vale of Soul-Making 