Rants and Raves

“What I don’t understand about you is this,” she said. “You hold to your old belief in goodness with a tenacity that is virtually unshakable. Yet you are so good at being what you are! You hunt your victims like a dark angel. You kill ruthlessly. You feast all the night long on victims when you choose.” “So?” I looked at her coldly. “I don’t know how to be bad at being bad.” She laughed. “I was a good marksman when I was a young man,” I said, “a good actor on the stage. And now I am a good vampire. So much for our understanding of the word ‘good.’”

· Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

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No barber shaves so close but another finds his work.

· English Proverb

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… to wish to make a thing look pretty or look smart is to think poorly of it in itself and to want it more conventional, and to try to improve it is to weaken and perhaps destroy it.

· John Crowe Ransom

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And yet, I have found that nothing in this world is incapable of explanation if only one is smart enough or lucky enough to think of it.

· ”Ellery Queen”, The Chinese Orange Mystery

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Thus choosing to die resisting, rather than to live submitting, they fled only from dishonour, but met danger face to face, and after one brief moment, while at the summit of their fortune, escaped, not from their fear, but from their glory.

· Pericles, funeral oration

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She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.

· Walter Pater, referring to the Mona Lisa

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The persistent effort of so-called modern minds to explain mysteries can yield nothing in the long run but the nostalgic satisfaction of the small boy who discovers at last that his mechanical duck was made up of two wheels, three springs and a screw — objects which are doubtless reassuring, but he has lost his mechanical duck, and he has usually not found an explanation as to how it works.

· Carole Owens, The Lost Days of Agatha Christie

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In the world eye we were Laurel and Hardy

In our minds we were Heathcliff and Cathy

In a moment of wisdom we were a wizard and a witch

In a moment of freedom we were Don Quixote and Sancho

In reality we were just a boy and a girl who never looked back

…

· Yoko Ono, You’re the One

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…throughout The Nature of Gothic Ruskin asserts the idea of beauty in imperfection. The preference for change and variety in the Gothic style over symmetry and perfection, in Ruskin’s mind, expresses the flawed, but infinitely inspired, imagination of the Gothic workman.

· Peter O”Neil

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Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.

· Flannery O’Connor

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