Top 100 Gothic Quotes
#1. As a kid, I was obsessed with myths and legends and the haunting beauty of gothic stories.
Nathan Parsons
#2. Melrose is the finest remaining specimen of Gothic architecture in Scotland. Some of the sculptured flowers in the cloister arches are remarkably beautiful and delicate, and the two windows - the south and east oriels - are of a lightness and grace of execution really surprising.
Bayard Taylor
#3. Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.
Joyce Carol Oates
#4. A whole Gothic world had come to grief ... there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled ...
Evelyn Waugh
#5. As the architecture of a country always follows the earliest structures, American architecture should be a refinement of the log-house. The Egyptian is so of the cavern and the mound; the Chinese, of the tent; the Gothic, of overarching trees; the Greek, of a cabin.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#6. I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'?
Margaret Atwood
#7. An elliptical machine does not excite me as much as a Gothic novel and a chicken chimichanga.
Leah Marie Brown
#8. The grandeur of the Institute never failed to impress Magnus - the way it towered high and mighty above everything else, timeless and unmoving in its Gothic disapproval of all that was modern and changeable.
Cassandra Clare
#9. Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably useless.
H.L. Mencken
#10. Junior high is so much worse than high school because at least in high school different is more accepted, celebrated actually: all the girls with blue hair and gothic Hello Kitty backpacks.
Nikki Reed
#11. But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#12. Perhaps because my town was so naturally gothic in its architecture and relative isolation - the roads often closed in winter - my stories tended toward the ghostly and the creepily suspenseful right from the get-go.
Andrew Pyper
#13. What I've absorbed of the gothic or paranormal has come mainly from films.
Glen Duncan
#14. What a misfortune it isto be bornawoman!? Why seek for knowledge, which can prove only that our wretchedness is irremediable? If a ray of light break in upon us, it is but to make darkness more visible; to show usthenew limits, the Gothic structure, theimpenetrable barriers of our prison.
Maria Edgeworth
#15. Moths are the ones that freak me out. It's something to do with the way that, if they get squashed, they turn to dust. There's something very wrong about that. It all feels a bit Gothic.
David Tennant
#16. I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.
Amy Tan
#17. I wouldn't consider myself Goth, but I love Gothic pieces.
Tyson Chandler
#18. She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.
Anonymous
#19. Western cathedrals and abbeys ... through soaring Gothic architecture, [give] us at floor level a sense of belonging within (but unable at the moment to inhabit more than a little of) great spaces of light and beauty, into which, significantly, only our music can penetrate.
N. T. Wright
#20. I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough to live it.
Chaim Potok
#21. No smiling!" said Melinda. "Look stern, everyone."...
He kissed her. "Our American Gothic."
"Sweet Montana Farms style." And she kissed him back.
Roxanne Snopek
#22. It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.
John Ruskin
#23. The gothic reminds us that we are mainly driven by our passions; the Gothic deals in illicit desires, in what is prohibited by society.
David Punter
#24. Everybody is, I suppose, either Classic or Gothic by nature. Either you feel in your bones that buildings should be rectangular boxes with lids to them, or you are moved to the marrow by walls that climb and branch, and break into a inflorescence of pinnacles.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#25. What I like about narrative in general is when there is some incongruity between the form and content. Let's say, mixing up the gothic with a coming-of-age narrative. Telling a love story that's also a monster story. Mixing up superhero tropes with your monster tropes. I like category confusion.
Kelly Link
#26. Sudenly a gothic old man flu in on his broomstick. He had lung black hair and a looong black bread. He wus werring a blak robe dat sed 'avril lavigne' on da back. He shotted a spel and Vlodemort ran away. It was ... DUMBLYDORE!
Tara Gilesbie
#27. Some of our hearts are more Gothic and take to haunting.
Junot Diaz
#28. Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque.
Frank Wedekind
#29. I eased back into the throne. Damn comfortable: swan-down and silk. Kinging it is pain in the arse enough without one of those gothic chairs.
Mark Lawrence
#30. These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don't have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks.
Jimmy Buffett
#31. Surely that little pseudo-gothic church on Broadway, hidden amongst the skyscrapers, is symbolic of the age! On the whole face of the globe the civilization that has conquered it has failed to build a temple or a tomb.
Andre Malraux
#32. For me, Gothic is something from my youth, when I had a heavy metal phase.
Ann Demeulemeester
#33. Included in the Presqueville is the Cathedrale St.-Jean, a church built during medieval times, including both Romanesque and Gothic styles; its nave, with its flying buttresses flinging out their support as the walls sweep toward the heavens
Jane Thompson
#34. Well, Italy had been overrun by the War, there had practically been civil war, north and south of the Gothic Line, heavy bombing, the northern industrial cities had been bombed heavily and we had political disorder before 1948.
Gianni Agnelli
#35. Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.
Marshall McLuhan
#36. Don't get all gothic and emo on me now. - Tory
Matthew Leeth
#37. One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#38. Tunstell was not what one could describe as call subtle. His flaming red hair bobbed up with each pointed and articulated footstep as though he were some cloaked Gothic villain creeping across a stage.
Gail Carriger
#39. A Gothic building engenders true religion ... The light, falling through colored glass, the singular forms of the architecture, unite to give a silent image of that infinite mystery which the soul for ever feels, and never comprehends.
Madame De Stael
#40. A French woman is a perfect architect in dress: she never, with Gothic ignorance, mixes the orders; she never tricks out a snobby Doric shape with Corinthian finery; or, to speak without metaphor, she conforms to general fashion only when it happens not to be repugnant to private beauty.
Oliver Goldsmith
#41. Ooh la la! A real gothic romance, I don't doubt. What secrets and scandals it must contain." She wagged her eyebrows comically. "Now that's a book that might very well hold my attention.
Julie Klassen
#42. I do enjoy Gothic fiction or books about zombies if they are well written and I like vampires.
Roddy Doyle
#43. If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired Cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystic light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially.
Don DeLillo
#44. Before that I wanted to be a magazine illustrator - I probably would have painted Gothic scenes.
Ira Levin
#45. I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.
Peter Ackroyd
#46. The form of the Gothic novel also implicitly contested the claims of Realism to reflect the world directly by showing how artificial its structure was.
Michael Richardson
#47. So I may not have had a gothic childhood, but childhood makes its own gothicity.
George Saunders
#48. I knew I was different from the rest of you plebes. Look how silly and gothic you all look with your skinny, knobbed arms. I'm unique. Neoclassical.
N.D. Wilson
#49. Kim Newman brings Dracula back home in the granddaddy of all vampire adventures. Anno Dracula couldn't be more fun if Bram Stoker had scripted it for Hammer. It's a beautifully constructed Gothic epic that knocks almost every other vampire novel out for the count.
Christopher Fowler
#50. You can only maintain an immensely gothic attitude for so long before either killing yourself or beginning to feel like a poser.
Poppy Z. Brite
#51. Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.
Emil Cioran
#52. Our souls are full of Gothic arches, pinnacles, twisted traceries we cannot shake off, and of which Greek minds knew nothing.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#53. Preacher is a book that somehow allows me time by its settling on it's characters, that sort of modern gothic western feel. You're not likely to see the boat veering too far from that.
Garth Ennis
#54. [On New York:] ... a city rose before me. It was narrow and tall like a gothic temple, surrounded by water, and ... it suddenly appeared, as if with a slight push it detached itself out of the invisible into the visible.
Nina Berberova
#56. Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
George Santayana
#57. There is no greater motor for architecture than religious fervor. Ancient examples include the Inca, Aztec Egyptian civilizations. In more recent times, Christianity gave rise to the Gothic and Romanesque architecture of the European middle ages and Islam produced the wonders of the Ottoman Empire.
Helen Grant Ross
#58. And really, really, when you put a fairy tale together with grime and despair and industrial angst you get the Gothic, and that's where we live, Percy.
Catherynne M Valente
#59. The mighty edifice of Government science dominated the scene in the middle of the 20th century as a Gothic cathedral dominated a 13th century landscape. The work of many hands over many years, it universally inspired admiration, wonder and fear.
A. Hunter Dupree
#60. I couldn't go now to a brand that had a niche attitude like ... gothic. I couldn't do that. Well, I could do it, but I wouldn't find it interesting, challenging.
Raf Simons
#61. What the world needs right now ... a good, artistic, gothic, terrifying scare
Iggy Pop
#62. Revived in this country the long forgotten beauties of Gothic architecture.
James Wyatt
#63. Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post Gothic mode.
Brian Aldiss
#64. I was a beautiful vampire princess loved, worshiped and admired by all. I lived in a luxurious gothic castle and I have no idea how I ended up at this fiberglass table with you losers.
Alyson Noel
#65. The sublime signals the limits of rationality - the 'sleep' of reason - and was best communicated by obscurity. So in the same spirit as the recipes 'to make a romance', 'seven types of obscurity' could be proposed for a Gothic novel:
Nick Groom
#66. Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere.
Andrea Barrett
#67. Crouching in position posing in perfect posture
On the rooftop of a gothic cathedral sits a monster
Justin Bienvenue
#69. Here is another marvy glimpse into the gothic basement that I call my mind.
Louise Rennison
#70. You say one more thing that sounds like it's ripped from the pages of a really bad gothic romance and I'm out of here, are we clear? - Valkyrie Cain
Derek Landy
#71. My outfit was a black dress with a corset waist, off-the-shoulder sleeves, and a large ball gown skirt. It looked like something someone might've worn to a Gothic wedding. And then they'd been buried in it for a few months.
Amanda Hocking
#72. No creaking gates, no gothic towers, no shuttered windows. Yet for the past ten months this house has been the focus of an astonishing barrage of supernatural activity.
Michael Parkinson
#73. The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.
Camille Paglia
#74. You know what this area needs? he says to no one in particular. A thirty-six floor gothic skyscraper.
Eric Boyd
#75. The cat is classic whilst the dog is Gothic - nowhere in the animal world can we discover such really Hellenic perfection of form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the felidae.
H.P. Lovecraft
#76. On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century ... First of all, what style should I employ?
Umberto Eco
#77. I kinda looked like a wanna-be Goth chick, or an unfortunate Persian girl in a Gothic romance who was wasting away from Tuberculosis. But that was alright. Oz had mentioned he wasn't human. He was probably into that sort of thing.
Katherine Pine
#78. Below are some quotations along these lines. Select a quote for your Gothic Myspace layout or contribute one of your own.
Laura Ramirez
#79. I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.
John McGahern
#80. To me, steampunk and urban fantasy are naturally hinged together. And I think that's because I love the early gothic Victorian literature, and both things spring from that movement.
Gail Carriger
#81. Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.
Russell Kirk
#82. Icon of Prague, the medieval bridge crossed the Vltava between Old Town and the Little Quarter. Gothic bridge towers rose on both sides, and the whole span - pedestrian-only - was lined by monumental statues of saints.
Laini Taylor
#83. A shivery, delicious Southern Gothic with feuding families, dark spirits, ancient curses and caught up in the middle, a young girl learning to live and love for the first time. Atmospheric and suspenseful, Compulsion will draw you in and hold you until the very last page.
Leah Cypess
#84. Religious figures, gargoyles, and grotesques, she though, looked fine on Gothic cathedrals, but she'd always spent more time looking at the murals inside the buildings than the carvings outside.
So why did this one seem to have captured all her attention?
Christine Warren
#85. I decorated my house like a medieval gothic castle, European-style. Chandeliers and red velvet curtains. My bedroom is pink and black, my bathroom is totally Hello Kitty, I have a massive pink couch and a big antique gold cross.
Avril Lavigne
#86. I wanted to keep a Gothic cathedral alive in my heart.
Susan Vreeland
#87. The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.
Heinrich Heine
#88. Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
Terry Eagleton
#89. I love gothic monsters, but I like to root them more firmly in the traditional folklore from which they sprang. Or at least, I like to evoke the feeling of those folk stories.
Ted Naifeh
#90. Seldom is a Gothic head more beautiful than when broken.
Andre Malraux
#91. People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral.
Heinrich Heine
#92. By the time Domenica arrived at the Gothic Revival sandstone building on Queen Street, she had put out of her mind all thought of Antonia's torrid affair - at least she assumed it was torrid, and anyway, she wondered if there was any point in having an affair which was not torrid.
Alexander McCall Smith
#93. Good Lord. His appearance was nearly a caricature of the dark and brooding hero from every gothic novel.
Tarun Shanker
#94. Wish my life were inside a book
So I could turn to the ending,
See if it is a love story
Or a gothic disaster.
Stasia Ward Kehoe
#95. The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#96. In one point of view, Gothic is not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble.
John Ruskin
#97. Go out and find a copy of 'The Shrinking Of Treehorn' and its sequel, 'Treehorn's Treasure.' Written by Florence Parry Heide and illustrated by the great Edward Gorey, master of the gothic and the macabre, these books are small masterpieces.
Chris Riddell
#98. Nico was gothic, but she was Mary Shelley gothic to everyone else's Hammer horror film gothic. They both did Frankenstein, but Nico's was real.
Peter Murphy
#99. Lucy absently thanked him and at once began to consider which among her gowns would be best suited for a midnight adventure to a gothic castle.
David Liss
#100. You hear mothers say all the time that they would die for their children, but my mom never said shit like that. She didn't have to. When it came to my brother, it was written across her face in 112-point Tupac Gothic.
Junot Diaz
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