Vernon Lee > Quotes

“The fact is, that having once seen Alice Oke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one could have fancied her at all different: there was something so complete, so completely unlike every one else, in her personality, that she seemed always to have been present in one’s consciousness, although present, perhaps, as an enigma.”
― Vernon Lee, Wayward Girls and Wicked Women

“Sor Asdrubale,* as they call my landlord, is also a notary. He regrets the Pontifical Government,* having had a cousin who was a Cardinal’s train-bearer, and believes that if only you lay a table for two, light four candles made of dead men’s fat, and perform certain rites about which he is not very precise, you can, on Christmas Eve and similar nights, summon up San Pasquale Baylon,* who will write you the winning numbers of the lottery upon the smoked back of a plate, if you have previously slapped him on both cheeks and repeated three Ave Marias. The difficulty consists in obtaining the dead men’s fat for the candles, and also in slapping the saint before he have time to vanish. “If it were not for that,” says Sor Asdrubale, “the Government would have had to suppress the lottery ages ago—eh!”
― Vernon Lee, The Virgin of the Seven Daggers: and Other Stories

“There he presides, variously Olympian, over the dreary 1820 wallpapers and sofas and card-tables, key-patterned or sham Gothic, but all faded and dust-engrained; among the dismal collections of ores and crystals and skulls and stuffed birds : a pantalooned and stocked and swallow-tailed Rentier Faust. And round him that court of huge blackened casts, Ludovisi Junos and Rondanini Joves, and various decapitated Adorantes and Ilioneuses ; that other company of faded ladies, stomachered or short-waisted, Lottes and Lilis and Maximilianes and Christianes, Suleikas, Gretchens, and Ottilies, on whose love and love for him (as on the succulent roast ox-thighs of Homeric days) the god Wolfgang nourished and increased his own divinity.”
― Vernon Lee

“If there are such things as ghosts," he replied, "I don't think they should be taken lightly. God would not permit them to be, except as a warning or a punishment.”
― Vernon Lee, Hauntings