An “angel” is anything that carries out a mission for God. This includes forces of nature. […] Photosynthesis? That’s an angel. Gravity? An angel. Magnetism? Angel. The Midrash in Bereishis Rabbah (chapter 1) says than an angel only performs one job. That job doesn’t have to be destroying Sodom; it could be peristalsis, centripetal force or condensation.
— Rabbi Jack Abramowitz, Angels
Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
She wore a dark silk dress and her hair was edged with two silver clips set with pearls in the pattern of jasmine flowers.
— Meena Alexander, from Fault Lines, originally published c. 1993
“A dead stork was lying by the sea; it had a melancholy effect on me—it had just reached the sea and then sunk down dead.“
— Hans Christian Andersen, diary entry from May 6, 1841— Fatimah Asghar, How’d Your Parents Die Again?
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
— Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgement of God
“Go see a shrink or take a pill, or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll you need to sleep.”
— Margaret Atwood, from Morning in the Burned House; A Sad Child
Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.
— Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
A basic problem is linked to the very idea of philosphy: how to get out of the human situation.
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion
‘I love you as I love..? I love you as I love the night’s high vault
O silent one, o sorrow’s lachrymal,
And love you more because you flee from me, And temptress of my nights, ironically
You seem to hoard the space,
to take to you
What separates my arms from heaven’s blue.
I climb to the assault,
attack the source,
A choir of wormlets pressing towards a corpse, And cherish your unbending cruelty,
This iciness so beautiful to me.
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal)
“…It’s just as if I let myself crash violently into myself…”
Simone de Beauvoir, from a letter to Jean Paul-Sartre c. October 1949 featured in Letters to Sartre
“[…] my memory was still full of images of mud-stained ermine, of trampled lilies; […]”
Simone de Beauvoir, from Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Live in fear of judgment day and have a great horror of hell. Yearn for everlasting life with holy desire. Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die. Hour by hour keep careful watch over all you do, aware that God’s gaze is upon you, wherever you may be.
The Rule of Saint Benedict
Naturkind.
Thomas Bernhard, Auslöschung
BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
“He was in her thoughts – a deep tender sultry garden.”
— Alexander Blok, from Poems of Sophia: “Crossroads”
I wonder how many times each day she dies a little.
Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
As her pale body rotted in the river, It happened (very slowly) that God forgot her, First her face, her hands, at last her hair. Then she was carrion with the carrion in the water.
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Concerning A Drowned Girl’ from Selected Poems: Bertolt Brecht
“I could hardly let Emily go — I wanted to hold her back then — and I want her back hourly now.”
— Charlotte Brontë, from a letter to W. S. Williams, talking about the death of her sister Emily
“My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was—liberty.”
— Charlotte Brontë talking about her sister Emily in “The Complete Poems Of Emily Brontë
First melted off the hope of youth,
Then fancy’s rainbow fast withdrew;
And then experience told me truth
In mortal bosoms never grew.
’Twas grief enough to think mankind
All hollow, servile, insincere;
But worse to trust to my own mind
And find the same corruption there.
Emily Brontë, “I Am the Only Being Whose Doom”
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Summer will be here
soon, and the balcony will be covered with ivy,
— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
“Seldom were unclean spirits envisaged as numinous forms wafting out of the victim.
Rather, they crawled out from an orifice: usually, though not universally, through the mouth.
This was the case in numerous miracle stories, where the spirit was said to be vomited forth variously as a toad, blood, frozen coal, black smoke, a hairy worm, unspecified “terrible things,” or a red rock together with a leaf.”
— Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Age
Jonathan Carroll
— Anne Carson, from “Book Of Isaiah”, Glass, Irony and Go
cinis lixiva the spent or smouldering ‘fires’ of love or enmity.
Anne Carson, Nox
Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well as modern contexts. Consider how many female celebrities of classical mythology, literature and cult make themselves objectionable by the way they use their voice. For example there is the heartchilling groan of the Gorgon, whose name is derived from a Sanskrit word garg meaning “a guttural animal howl that issues as a great wind from the back of the throat through a hugely distended mouth.” There are the Furies whose highpitched and horrendous voices are compared by Aiskhylos to howling dogs or sounds of people being tortured in hell. There is the deadly voice of the Sirens and the dangerous ventriloquism of Helen and the incredible babbling of Kassandra and the fearsome hullabaloo of Artemis as she charges through the woods. There is the seductive discourse of Aphrodite which is so concrete an aspect of her power that she can wear it on her belt as a physical object or lend it to other women. There is the old woman of Eleusinian legend Iambe who shrieks and throws her skirt up over her head to expose her genitalia. There is the haunting garrulity of the nymph Echo (daughter of Iambe in Athenian legend) who is described by Sophokles as “the girl with no door on her mouth.” Putting a door on the female mouth as been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.
Anne Carson, The Gender of Sound
“—softly, with hands as gentle as rain, I shall strangle him.”
— Angela Carter, The Erl-King
I know no religion but the black of your hair matted against the pillow.
Maari Carter, from “Homemade Sin”
And God said, let there be blood
And God said, flood
And God said, good is a woman l
with fruit in her womb and not
in her hand
And God said, sin
And God did not say, forgive
And God said, I will make a stormy wind
And God said, son, a breath stirring
And God said, highly favored
And God said, condemned
And God said,
I will blot out man whom I have created,
for I am sorry that
I have made them
And God said, listen
and sank a boy in her
like a stone
— Leila Chatti, “Litany While Reading Scripture in the Gynecologic Oncology Waiting Room”- What Will Happen
One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, and live in the world as if in a vast museum of
Strangeness.
Giorgio de Chirico
Baudelaire has taught me that life is the ecstasy of worms basking in the sun.
— Emil Cioran, from the essay Nature and Nihilism
“I don’t remember lighting this cigarette and I don’t remember if I’m here alone or waiting for someone.”
— Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing
hexafu 