AD > AD's Quotes

“What are books but tangible dreams? What is reading if it is not dreaming? The best books cause us to dream; the rest are not worth reading.”
― Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade

“When the Devil was a woman,
When Lilith wound
Her ebony hair in heavy braids,
And framed
Her pale features all 'round
With Botticelli's tangled thoughts,
When she, smiling softly,
Ringed all her slim fingers
In golden bands with brilliant stones,
When she leafed through Villiers
And loved Huysmans,
When she fathomed Maeterlinck's silence
And bathed her Soul
In Gabriel d'Annunzio's colors,
She even laughed
And as she laughed,
The little princess of serpents sprang
Out of her mouth.
Then the most beautiful of she-devils
Sought after the serpent,
She seized the Queen of Serpents
With her ringed finger,
So that she wound and hissed
Hissed, hissed
And spit venom.
In a heavy copper vase;
Damp earth,
Black damp earth
She scattered upon it.
Lightly her great hands caressed
This heavy copper vase
All around,
Her pale lips lightly sang
Her ancient curse.
Like a children's rhyme her curses chimed,
Soft and languid
Languid as the kisses,
That the damp earth drank
From her mouth,
But life arose in the vase,
And tempted by her languid kisses,
And tempted by those sweet tones,
From the black earth slowly there crept,
Orchids -
When the most beloved
Adorns her pale features before the mirror
All 'round with Botticelli's adders,
There creep sideways from the copper vase,
Orchids-
Devil's blossoms which the ancient earth,
Wed by Lilith's curse
To serpent's venom, has borne to the light
Orchids-
The Devil's blossoms-

"The Diary Of An Orange Tree”
― Hanns Heinz Ewers, Nachtmahr: Strange Tales

“I have been studying for forty years, which is to say forty wasted years; I teach others yet am ignorant of everything; this state of affairs fills my soul with so much humiliation and disgust that my life is intolerable. I was born in Time, I live in Time, and do not know what Time is. I find myself at a point between two eternities, as our wise men say, yet I have no conception of eternity. I am composed of matter, I think, but have never been able to discover what produces thought. I do not know whether or not I think with my head the same way that I hold things with my hands. Not only is the origin of my thought unknown to me, but the origin of my movements is equally hidden: I do not know why I exist. Yet every day people ask me questions on all these issues. I must give answers, yet have nothing worth saying, so I talk a great deal, and am confused and ashamed of myself afterwards for having spoken.”
― Voltaire, Micromégas and Other Short Fictions

“The wisdom which is now conventional claims that light creates shadows. But the facts are otherwise. Darkness came first and is infinitely older and more enduring than light. Light borrows a little space; then it dies or moves on, and the dark exists again as if it had never been disturbed.”
― K.J. Bishop, The Etched City

“The trouble with the scientific approach, thought the Brigadier, was that it left you at the mercy of your scientists.”
― Terrance Dicks, Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion

“The specific mode of existence of man implies the need of his learning what happens, and above all what can happen, in the world around him and his own interior world. That it is a matter of the structure of the human condition is shown, outer alia, by the existential necessity of listening to stories and fairy tales, even in the most tragic of circumstances.”
― Mircea Eliade, The Forbidden Forest

“The unnatural and the strange have a perfume of their own”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.”
― Angela Carter

“I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?

You aint nothin.

You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered himself up entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his innermost heart, only that man can dance.

Even a dumb animal can dance.

The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the floodlamps. Bears that dance, bears that dont.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”
― Edward Abbey

“People don't want other people to be people.”
― Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw

“Poetry is one of the most beautiful shadows a civilisation can cast across time,”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“The life of an individual is a constant struggle, and not merely a metaphorical one against want or boredom, but also an actual struggle against other people. He discovers adversaries everywhere, lives in continual conflict and dies with sword in hand.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World

“Covering oneself, surrounding oneself with shapes and colors that correspond to a plan, mean that that plan is beginning to be realized.”
― Josephin Peladan

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“Marriage as a long conversation. - When marrying you should ask yourself this question: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into your old age? Everything else in a marriage is transitory, but most of the time that you're together will be devoted to conversation.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“Being a god is the quality of being able to be yourself to such an extent that your passions correspond with the forces of the universe, so that”
― Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

“Nobody steals books but your friends.”
― Roger Zelazny, The Guns of Avalon

“Be the flame, not the moth.”
― Giacomo Casanova

“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”
― Emil Cioran

“One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.”
― John Cowper Powys