Indeed, as things stand for the present, the land of Spirits
is a kind of America...filled up with Mountains, Seas and
Monsters.
- Joseph Glanville "A Blow at Modern Sadducism (1668)
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away.
- William Hughes Mearns, "Antigonish"
Perhaps other souls than human
are sometimes born into the World
and clothed in Human flesh.
- Joseph Sheridan Le fanu "Uncle Silas" (1864)
Quis est iste venit
What is this who is coming
- After M.R. James, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll come
to you, my Lord"
A man is a very small thing, and the night
is very large and full of wonders.
- Lord Dunsany
It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of
shadows, only shadows.
Curses and ghosts, the evil spirits that have cast
entire cities into sleep
- Maxim Gorky "On a visit to the Kingdom
of Shadows" (1896)
To the house wherein the dwellers are bereft of
light, where dust is their fare and clay their food,
where they see no light, residing in darkness, where
they are clothed like birds, with wings for garments,
and where over door and bolt is spread dust.
-"Istar's Descent to the Underworld"
Ancient Near Eastern Texts (1950)
Like a dog, he hunts in dreams.
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) "Locksley Hall"
Oh! How many torments lie in the
small circles of a wedding ring!
- Colley Cibbes (1671-1757) "The Double Gallant)
Take to my side
And we'll walk on
to where the frost of the Dead King
Weigh heavy on the vine
- Espers "The Dead King"
And ye shall overthrow their altars,
and break their pillars, and burn their
groves with fire; and ye shall hew
down the graven images of their Gods,
and destroy the names of them out of
that place
- Deuteronomy 12: 3
It should be noted that children at play
are not merely playing; their games
should be seen as their most serious
actions.
- Michel de Montaigne (1533-1597) Essays 1,23
What would your good do if evil
didn't exist, and what would the
Earth look like if all the shadows
disappeared?
- Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita
She had confronted Barbie during the pretrial proceedings-
What the French call I'nstruction- and when he was asked
if he recognized her, he said "When you have been in prison
for seven months it's always agreeable to see a desirable woman.'
When Simone Lagrange said that remark insulted her, he said; "The
trouble with you is you can't take a joke,"
- Former Gestapo Chief Klaus Barbe
"The Butcher of Lyons"
There is no reason why good cannot triumph
over Evil. The triumph of anything is a matter
of organization. If there are such things as Angels,
I hope that they are organized along the lines of
the Mafia.
- Kurt Vonnegut, "The Sirens of Titan"
Had I turned into a Soulless person,
a wicked man, a murderer? I went on plying
my conscience with questions. Had I done anything in the War
but my duty and my obligations? Had I done anything but
remain loyal to my Oath and obedient to my Orders?
And my conscience answered me reassuringly. NO, nothing
else. Had I killed defenseless people, or order them to be
killed? NO, NO, NO. What in the Devil's name did they
want of me?
-Extract Memoirs of Adolf Eichmann
architect of the final Solution
published in "The People" Newspaper, 1961
[We] will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the Earth
and will deliver them to their accusers in order that
Justice may be done.
-From concerning Responsibility of
" Hitlerites for Committed Atrocities"
October 30th, 1943, signed by Roosevelt, Churchill &Stalin
He fled in fear and reached the
silent fields
And howled his heart out, trying in
vain to speak
- Ovid, Metamorphoses
"We! Lord, quoth the gentyle knight,
Whether this be the Grene Chapel?
Here myght about midnight
The Devil his matynes telle."
-Sir Gawain & The Green Knight
We humans fear the beast within
The Wolf because we do not understand
the Beast within ourselves.
- Gerald Hausman, Meditations
with the Navajos
The forenoon is burn-faced and wandering
And I am the Death of the Moon.
Below my countenance the Bell of
the night has broken
And I am the new Divine Wolf.
- Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber
The Divine Wolf)
I prefer Winter and Fall, when you
feel the Bone structure of the landscape-
The loneliness of it, the dead feeling of
Winter. Something waits beneath it, the
whole story doesn't show.
-Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)
What beck'ning Ghost, along the
moonlight shade invites my step,
and points to yonder glade?
-Elegy to the memory of
an unfortunate lady
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
I Rage, I melt, I burn,
The feeble God has stab'd me to the Heart
- "Acis and Galatea'"
John Gay (1685-1732)
For the Angel of Death spread his
Wings on the blast
and breathed in the face of the foe as
he passed...
-"The Destruction of Sennacherib',
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow
- "Requiescat" Oscar Wilde
(1856-1900)
Put the case, Pip, that here was one
pretty little child out of the heap,
who could be saved... The legal advisor
had this power; " I know what you did, and
how you did it. You came so, and so,
This was your manner of resistance, you'went
so and so, you and such and such things
to divert suspicion. I have tracked you
through it all, and I tell it you all.
Part with the child...give the child
into my hands."
- Charles Dickens
Great Expectations
Don't ask us what it's like
in that moment when the body
skitters away from that stupid
sheepy shape of breath.
Down here, no one asks.
We all died
Boot to throat
We all went out
shrieking some Bloody name
- Danielle Parfunda
" The Dead Girls Speak In Unison"
When we creak your step
When we crack your glass
When we tap, tap ,tap
That is a Bone
That is all we have
Though we are very shiny,
and filled with beetles
We are made entirely of Bone.
- Danielle Parfunda
"Dead Girls Speak In Unison"
We're stitching up
all your fancy mistakes
We're stitching up
Your Mother's face.
We're going to stitch you a new one
We're going to take our time.
- Danielle Parfunda
" Dead Girls Speak In Unison"
In the Worst of all men there is
a little bit of good that will destroy them.
- William Rose (1914-1987)
For the Soul is Dead that slumbers...
Dust thou art, to Dust returnest.
Was not spoken of the Soul.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"A Psalm of Life"
War is a mythical happening...
Where else in human experiences
except in the throes of ardor...
do we find ourselves transported
to a mythical condition and the
Gods most real?
-James Hillman
" A Terrible Love of War"
I fought single-handed,
yet against such men no one
could do battle.
- Homer, Odyssey, Book 1
I dream of Horsemen in smoking hills,
shadows on horseback, reed breastplates,
quirts, half-breed moon. Some other
war. Some other ancient war but this
same place.
-Richard Currey, "Crossing Over:
The Vietnam stories"
Q: What were you firing at?
A: At the enemy, Sir.
Q: At People?
A: At the enemy, Sir.
Q: They weren't even Human Beings?
A: Yes, Sir.
Q: Were they Men?
A: I don't know, Sir.
- Testimony of Lieutenant William Calley,
the My Lai Courts-Martial, 1970
Menelaus: We were swindled by
the Gods. We had our hands upon
an Idol of the Clouds.
Messenger: You mean it was for a cloud,
for nothing, we did all that work?
- Euripides, Helen, LL
I wish I Lived in my house with
only a third part of all
these goods, and that the men
were alive who died in those days
In wide Troy Land...
-Homer, Odyssey Book 24
The truth is often a terrible weapon
of aggression. It is possible to lie, and
even to murder for the truth.
- Alfred Adler (1890-1937)
Problems of neurosis
I hate and I love. Perhaps you
ask why I do so. I do not know,
but I feel it happen and I am
tormented.
- Catullus, Carmina, 85
A false friend is more dangerous
than an open enemy.
- Francis Bacon (1516-1626)
" A Letter of Advice...to the Duke
of Buckingham"
So, so, break off this last lamenting
kiss, which sucks two souls, and vapours
both away, turn thou ghost that way,
and let me turn this...
- John Donne (1572-1631)
" The Expiration"
Three may keep a secret, if two of
them are dead.
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Poor Richard's Almanac
For the dead travel fast.
- Bram Stoker (1847-1912)
Dracula ( After Burger's 'Lenore')
My Heart asks for Peace-
Day after Day flies by, and every
hour takes away
A little piece of Life; but you and I,
we two,
We contemplate living...
- Aleksandr Pushkin
(1799-1837) - " It's time,
my friend, it's time."
All things are an exchange for fire,
and fire for all things, as goods for
Gold and gold for Gods
-Heraclitus (c 535-475 BC)
He will now be felled with my arrow,
As I am enraged at him, and gone are
jis lives now, and indeed the earth
shall drink his blood.
-Srimad Valmiki Ramayana
(c 500-100 BC)
The harvest is plentiful, but the
laborers are few.
- Matthew 9:37
Night's candles are burnt out, and
jocund day
stands tiptoe on the misty mounted
tops
I must be gone and live, or stay and die
-William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet lll, V
For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is without blood.
These hunt, as they have done
But with claws and teeth
grown perfect,
More deadly than they can believe
-James Dickey (1923-97)
"The Heaven of Animals)
I
am found
O let him
Scald me and drown
Me in his world's wound.
- Dylan Thomas (1914-53)
"Vision an Prayer"
Where can a dead man go?
A question with an answer only dead men know.
_ Nickel Creek "When in Rome"
Shape without form, shade without color
paralyzed force, gesture without motion
Those who have crossed
with direct eye, to deaths other kingdom
Remember us- if at all-not as lost
violent souls, but only
As the hollow men...
-T S Eliot "The Hollow Men"
I myself am Hell
nobody's here-
-Robert Lowell "Skunk Hour"
Into the dark night
Resignedly I go,
I am no so afraid of the dark night
As the friends I do not know
I do not fear the night above,
As I fear the friends below
- Stevie Smith "Dirge"
Revenge proves its own Executioner
- John Ford, The Broken Heart
And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid
-Sufjan Stevens "John Wayne Gacy Jr."
And what I want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed
boy, Mister death
-ee cummings
" Buffalo Bill's / Defunct"
No one can know the origin of evil
who has no grasped the truth about
the so-called Devil and his angels
-Origen (186-255)
He that hath wife and children,
hath given hostages to fortune...
-Francis Bacon, Essays (1625)
But thee and me he never can destroy,
change us he may, but not o'erwhelm; we are
Of as eternal essence, and must war
With Him if He war with us...
-Lord Byron,
Heaven and Earth: A Mystery (1821)
I tell them there is no forgiveness
and yet there is always forgiveness
-Michael Collins
(1890-1922)
Through these years I've seen days
that I won't miss at all,
but then God knows I've been
As high as the Sun.
Through it all you kept me warm,
holding my hand,
but now you're on your own.
-Pinetop Seven, "Tennessee Pride"
The Soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd lets in the new light through
chinks that time has made; stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw nearer to the eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once the view...
- Edmund Waller, "Of the last verses in the book"
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together,
But when I look ahead up the White road beside you
gliding wrapt in brown mantle, hooded
-but who is that on the other side of you
-T S Eliot, The White Road
He gave no comfort, saved no one.
Adrift he moves by guilty moons...
-Pinetop Seven, "Mission District"
I seemed to move among a world of ghosts and feel myself
the shadow of a dream
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Princess"
When [the angels] descend, they put on the garment of the world.
If they did not put on a garment befitting this world
they could not endure in this world
and the world could not endure them
- The Zohar
There is no hope of death for these souls, and their lost life
is so low, that they are envious of any other kind
- Dante Alighier, The Inferno Canto lll
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance...
-Edward Thomas,
"Roads"
Judge not the preacher,
for he is thy judge
- George Herbert
" The Church-Porch"
"To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned"
-Rudyard Kipling
"Gentlemen-Rankers"
A great book is like great evil.
-Callimachus
(c.305-c. 240 B.C.)
"Alone, Alone , about a dreadful wood of conscious evil runs a lost mankind
dreading to find it's father.
- W.H. Auden, for the Time being
" For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was
afraid of is come unto me.
-Job 3:25
" Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight path and woke
to find myself in a dark wood."
-Dante, Inferno
For I am every dead thing...I am re-begot of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
-John Donne
"A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day"
Eadem mutata resurgo
(Though changed, I shall arise the same)
-Epitaph of Jakob Bernoulli,
Swiss pioneer of fluid dynamics & spiral mathematics
The concavities of my body are like another hell for their capacity.
- Sir Thomas Urquhart
"Rabelais Gargantua
He had a mind to be acquainted with your inside, Crispin.
- Edward Ravenscroft
The Anatomist
