Top 100 Quotes About The Gothic
#1. 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
#2. The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#3. What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings - younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older ...
Mohsin Hamid
#4. 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
#5. But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like.
Minoru Yamasaki
#6. The basis of the gothic are secrets that are kept combined with appearances that deceive.
Stephen King
#7. Shirley Jackson's writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#8. We've tried to use some visual motifs [in Beauty and the Beast]. As far as the cinematography and the lensing and all that, we are presenting a different view into that world. It's a little sleeker, but we're keeping the gothic feel underneath it.
Brian Wayne Peterson
#10. We must note carefully what distinction there is between a healthy and a diseased love of change; for as it was in healthy love of change that the Gothic architecture rose, it was partly in consequence of diseased love of change that it was destroyed.
John Ruskin
#11. The Gothic tradition was begun by Ann Radcliffe, a rare example of a woman creating an artistic style.
Camille Paglia
#12. Here is another marvy glimpse into the gothic basement that I call my mind.
Louise Rennison
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque.
Frank Wedekind
#20. 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
#21. 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
#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. 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
#24. What I've absorbed of the gothic or paranormal has come mainly from films.
Glen Duncan
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. When her mind was discomposed ... a book was the opiate that lulled it to repose.
Ann Radcliffe
#30. 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
#31. I am a solitary wave in the dark and desolate sea: and the sparkling glass I drank was drugged with misery.
Adelbert Von Chamisso
#32. We're in high school. If it didn't come from the school cafeteria, we like it.
S.K.N. Hammerstone
#33. 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
#34. You see the world in colors,
I see in Black and Red.
Irum Zahra
#35. Oh, now look. She prays to the Mother of Jesus as if she believes she can intercede for her. Ma infantile, you surely do not understand the depth of those repetitious lines, do you
Sai Marie Johnson
#36. Potential enemies make the best friends and lovers. Many a blessed union begins in adversity.
Randy Thornhorn
#37. His virtual home showed none of the ostentation of others in the Brotherhood, no Gothic-fortress-perched-on-impossible-cliffs or Caligulean excesses of decor (usually accompanied by an equally Caligulean want of decorum.)
Tad Williams
#38. But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.
Guillermo Del Toro
#39. An exaltation of spirit lifted me, as it were, far above the earth and the sinful creatures crawling on its surface; and I deemed myself as an eagle among the children of men, soaring on high, and looking down with pity and contempt on the grovelling creatures below.
James Hogg
#41. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.
Mervyn Peake
#42. All cats are gray in the dark. And besides, her actions have less to do with her, and everything to do with you.
Jaye Frances
#43. Good Lord. His appearance was nearly a caricature of the dark and brooding hero from every gothic novel.
Tarun Shanker
#44. 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
#45. In the 16th century,parks and gardens were models of the cosmos and also tools for altering one's consciousness, possibly for changing one's destiny.
Linda Lappin
#47. Crook your finger;
they'll come closer.
Pull the covers tighter to your chin;
in beside you they'll creep.
Emmanuelle De Maupassant
#48. There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#49. His was not the hatred that arises suddenly like a storm and as suddenly abates. It was, once the initial shock of anger and pain was over, a calculated thing that grew in a bloodless way.
Mervyn Peake
#50. Wicked eyes are not a good prospect for seminary boys. They want a gentle, soft sort of wife, not a wife who looks as though she may sprout wings and carry off the young children of the village. ~Maria "Smythe
Gwenn Wright
#51. I have learned one lesson in all this and I will share it knowing it will do no one any good. The lesson is this: "There are none more complicit in one's undoing than one's own heart".
James Pratt
#52. 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
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. The pagan gods are not dead, but can return to topple science with superstition and modern man with bestial pleasures that pre-date civilisation.
Richard Luckhurst
#59. I like the dark, mysterious, maybe even gothic type girls. They have to have a good personality too! I'm very picky!
Shia Labeouf
#60. He stood at the foot of the grave, gloved hands clasped behind him, his dark clothes and hair blending into one black silhouette, as if he were not a presence but an absence, a hole cut out of the landscape.
Amanda DeWees
#61. Grampa's long beard was serving as a bookmark in a well-thumbed paperback with a Western-themed cover. I never knew what would catch Grampa's fancy in the book department. He was as likely to be caught reading a gothic romantic suspense as he was a snowblower repair manual.
Jessie Crockett
#62. People do not ever change. The person you see later is merely the one that was hidden from you in the beginning.
Shane KP O'Neill - The Gates Of Babylon.
Shane K.P. O'Neill
#63. I never really wanted to die. But I followed through anyway. The pain in my heart was excruciating, and death was beautiful.
Rae Hachton
#64. The world is a parable-the habitation of symbols-the phantoms of spiritual things immortal shown in material shape.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
#65. And so the afternoon stretched on, and Ezbon toasted their imminent defeat to the dregs.
C.N. Faust
#66. When we became teenagers boredom grew like a moth in a cocoon fighting to escape, and the peace created by our parents became a prison. We sought excitement and adventure. We sought anything but the sinless, pure, and average of the faux idyllic.
Scott Thompson
#67. One speck of dung will spoil the pot. In order to keep my thoughts on a high level, I put a positive construction on things.
Kathleen Rowland
#68. At its heart, Gothic Fiction is the introvert's "Hero's Journey" where heroes and heroines must navigate the uncharted territory of the mind in order to solve the mystery of their life's adventure.
Barrymore Tebbs
#69. There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock.
Angela Carter
#70. The world was alive, the sky descending; our times were lullabies and sad goodbyes.
Nicholaus Patnaude
#71. But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid? [Referring to Gothic novels, fashionable in England at the beginning of the 19th century, but frowned upon in polite society.]
Jane Austen
#72. Jane sneezed three hundred dollars' worth of coke into the air.
Krishna's black eyes seem to have mirrors in them. She glances at me with a smile as big as the Cheshire Cat's.
Anthea Carson
#73. (speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.
Andre Breton
#74. The/ supreme end-result of/ early Gothic phallic forms/ is the skyscraper & the/ oil drill & powered/ compressor & pistons of/ great engines ...
Jack Kerouac
#75. It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition.
Thomas Hardy
#76. The salty, slightly stagnant smell of the marsh filled my nose. On the other side of the bed, a French door opened to what looked like the balcony. The curtain was drawn but a silhouette moved outside the gauzy white veil.
Sandi Beth Jones
#77. He would die in this room, buried alive by the weight of his life.
Christine Fonseca
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Crouching in position posing in perfect posture
On the rooftop of a gothic cathedral sits a monster
Justin Bienvenue
#82. 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
#83. Listen,
listen with your eyes,
and your lips.
Listen with your skin,
and your blood.
Can you hear us,
at the edges?
Emmanuelle De Maupassant
#84. I'd love for readers to read what books are about so that if they are expecting happy endings in dark horror novels, they won't reach for the Vallium or something worse!
Carole Gill
#85. 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
#86. I lie more convincingly than I tell the truth.
Simona Panova
#88. [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
#89. Scar tissue does more than flaunt its strength by chronicling the assaults it has withstood. Scar tissue is new growth. And it is tougher than skin innocent of the blade.
Shelley Jackson
#91. 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
#92. I liked the darkness, the dusty bay window, the view over the grey, muddy harbour and the towering cliffs beyond. How could I think of all that and dislike it, really, when in every nook and cranny I felt Peter's eyes peering out, watching me?
Ava Bloomfield
#93. When the moon was high over the moors, Rhineholt became a dark place with long, lonely corridors whose shadows gave breath to many secrets.
Amber Newberry
#94. 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
#95. Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu
#96. Bodies lay strewn all around. Turkish and Wallachian warriors caught in the intimate indiscriminate embrace of death.
Shane K.P. O'Neill
#97. You don't need a sad soul
to feel the beauty of a dead grave
Just stay with the pale moon
when darkness wants the night to be brave
Munia Khan
#98. 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
#99. The time groaned by as John made a fool of himself. Eventually, he grew numb to the death and sin around him. He even came to enjoy gallivanting cross-country like a true crusader. His name brought tears of joy or pain of anger to those he left in his wake. The result of his own unresolved pain.
Solange Nicole
#100. 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
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