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Raoul de Frescas is a young man who, in our pig-stye, has remained as pure and undefiled as an angel. He is our conscience; then again he is my creation; I am, all in one, his father and mother, and his Providence to boot.

One day the Sheath and the Dagger got into a quarrel. The Dagger said to the Sheath: "Sheath, my darling, you are a tart, for every day you keep receiving new daggers." The Sheath replied to the Dagger: "My friend Dagger, it is you who are the rascal for every day you change Sheaths." "Sheath, this is not at all what you promised me." "Dagger, you deceived me first."

It's quite evident that I'm not writing a novel for I neglect to use what no novelist would fail to use.He who takes what I am writing for the truth will be, perhaps, less in error than he who takes it for a fable.

He loved being in the city of New Orleans, away from his daddy and his older brother; though they'd never bother a soul again, since Elmer had destroyed both of them . He had chopped his daddy and brother into a total of exactly 100 pieces and buried one piece per acre on the land Herschel Burt owned in Evangeline Parish by Bayou Nezpique.

I was 29. I had survived the 7-year run of inhaler wads and psychoses. I quit booze, weed and pharmaceutical uppers. My new regime was abstinence. It boded horrific. I quit shoplifting and breaking into houses. I had not a spiritual awakening. Brain-screening women's faces had almost killed me.

If the sea's ebb tide has its times (exact to the second), then the ebb tide of being (though not a daily event) must also have its favorite hours, minutes, and even seconds.

Deftly Mia's mother gives the knife another swipe or two beneath the faucet, then places it in the dishwasher, which is two-thirds full of dishes and silverware. No problem for Mia's mother to rapidly punch in the controls, SANITIZE, EXTRA RINSE, set the dishwasher thrumming.

When you are adopted, it is not in your best interest to ask questions why.
To know that you are adopted is the answer to any question you might ask about your adoption.

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms no man can discover
For the dews that drip all over,
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore,
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging, unto skies of fire;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters—lone and dead,—
Their still waters—still and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily.

The System of Dr Tarr and Prof Fether: Believe nothing you hear, and only oned half that you see.

William Wilson: Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. I long, in passing through the dim valley, for the sympathy -- I nearly said for the pity -- of my fellow men. I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control.

Ligeia: I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams.

MS. Found in a Bottle: I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious.

Here I am back in a cell. Alone. Minutes, hours, days slip away with terrifying insubstantiality. Months will pass away like this, and years. Life! The problem of time is everything. Nothing distinguishes one hour from the next: The minutes and hours fall slowly, torturously.

Man imprisoned differs from man in general even in his outward appearance. Prison marks him from the very first hour ... papers, notebook, letters, snapshots, everything that characterizes a man, the little objects that accumulate around his private life -- all this is taken from him.

These people had come here because they preferred being together to being apart and because they couldn't stand Sundays of any kind, because on Sunday they felt bored. These were Magicians, People with a capital P, and their motto was "Monday starts on Saturday."

I glanced around and immediately sat down on the floor at the sight of a gigantic vulture with a naked neck and a menacingly curved beak sitting on the oven, carefully folding away its wings.
"Hello," I said. I was certain that the vulture could talk.
The vulture inclined its head and peered at me with one eye, which made it look like a chicken. I waved my hand in greeting.

The callous Schedoni, by a mistake not uncommon, especially to a mind of his character, substituted words for truths ... thus making his very incapacity an argument for his superior wisdom.

He shuddered at the expectation of meeting a woman who had instigated him to the murder of his own child, which, though he had been happily prevented from committing it, was an act that would still be wished for by the Marchesa.

It is no the truth which you seek; it is not the guilty whom you punish; the innocent, having no crimes to confess, are the victims of your cruelty, or, to escape from it, become criminal and proclaim a lie.

A dark malignity overspread the features of the monk, and at that moment Vivaldi thought he beheld a man whose passions might impel him to the perpetration of almost any crime, how hideous soever. He recoiled from him, as if he had suddenly seen a serpent in his path, and stood gazing on his face....

[H]e heard a sudden sound near him, and raising his head from the clock, he perceived the same figure! Before he had time for exclamation, the stranger crossed him again, "Go not to the villa Altieri," said he in a solemn voice, "lest you meet the fate you ought to dread."

Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house,
Write loyal cantons of contemned love'And sing them loud even in the dead of night.

It took about an hour to make the étoufée. We peeled the shrimp, then wilted the vegetables, and added tomatoes and garlic. I found peace in the small motor activity.... To cook is to heal.

Madame de Burne felt herself specifically born to the role of a fetish, created for that mission assigned to women by nature -- to be worshipped and pursued, to triumph over men by beauty, by grace, by coquetry and charm. She was indeed a sort of human goddess, delicate, disdainful, and demanding, worshipped by men whose love enthroned and deified her, like so much incense.

During her years of marriage, a longing for revenge may have germinated within her heart, an obscure need to pay all men back for what she had received from one of them, to be the stronger in her turn, to bend their wills, to search out their resistances, and to make them suffer too.

I wondered whether in the last month, now that curfew was over, she had chosen a different rendezvous, and I wondered with whom. That she had found a substitute I had no doubt. No one banks on fidelity nowadays.

Zen is not a systematic explanation of life, it is not an ideology, it is not a world view, it is not a theology of revelation and salvation, it is not a mystique, it is not a way of ascetic perfection, it is not mysticism as this is understood in the West, in fact it fits no convenient category of ours.

Just when I am sure he is a rapist and a swine, a sexual predator beyond the bounds of society and law, his conviction that he is doing nothing that the women around him don't wish him to do almost convinces me.

All of us dig at our own pure holes. We have nothing to achieve by our activities, nowhere to get to. Is there not something marvelous about this? We hurt no one and no one gets hurt. No victory, no defeat.