Ray Russell Quotes

“Beneath the haunted castle lies the dungeon keep: the womb from whose darkness the ego first emerged, the tomb to which it knows it must return at last. Beneath the crumbling shell or paternal authority, lies the maternal blackness, imagined by the Gothic writer as a prison, as a torture chamber- from which the cries of the kidnapped anima cannot even be heard. The upper and the lower levels of the ruined castle or abbey represent the contradictory fears at the heart of Gothic terror: dread of the superego, whose splendid battlements have been battered but not quite cast down- and of the id, whose buried darkness abounds in dark visions no stormer of the castle had ever touched.”
― Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel

“Inhuman, saith I? Nay: the beasts of the field and forest, lacking all humanity, e'en the most terrible among these, slay not by long deliberate slaying and for lust. Human, then, indeed, were those fell crimes.”
― Ray Russell, Sanguinarius

“I believe it is entirely possible for a man to possess not a single one of the virtues, to be a demon in human flesh.”
― Ray Russell, Sardonicus and Other Stories

“...belief does not depend upon logic, it is a delicate and fragile flower that draws nourishment from intuition and instinct and hunch.”
― Ray Russell, Sagittarius