Robena Keithley

“Thanks be to God, Who gives us suffering
as sacred remedy for all our sins,
that best and purest essence which prepares
the strong in spirit for divine delights!”
― Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil and Other Works/Les Fleurs du Mal et Oeuvres Choisies : A Dual-Language Book

“   In 1658, Francis Andrew Ransome stole the Alchemy Scroll from St. Julian’s college, my present employer. Ransome was a member of a transatlantic group called The Invisible College. They were alchemists, meaning they worked with matter and spirit together.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder

“People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“If civilization has got the better of barbarism when barbarism had the world to itself, it is too much to profess to be afraid lest barbarism, after having been fairly got under, should revive and conquer civilization. A civilization that can thus succumb to its vanquished enemy, must first have become so degenerate, that neither its appointed priests and teachers, nor anybody else, has the capacity, or will take the trouble, to stand up for it. If this be so, the sooner such a civilization receives notice to quit, the better. It can only go on from bad to worse, until destroyed and regenerated (like the Western Empire) by energetic barbarians.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty