Dark Literary Quotations

[Russell Nash]

Where I tread, I trample corpses,
In my brain, poison thoughts do flow,
With fierce grim eyes, I hurl torches,
Now kneel, worm—pray! Or melt in my mad glow!

Nietzsche, After a Nocturnal Thunderstorm, July 1871.


Where you stand, dig deep and pry!
Down there is the well.
Let the obscurantists cry:
"Down there's only—hell!"

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1877.


To die thus,
As once I saw him die —
Vanquishing, destroying ...

Nietzsche, Ultimate Will, 1883

[hopfrog]

"I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time -- those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything."
--Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990)

[Russell Nash]

"Llega un momento en la vida en que, haga uno lo que haga, solamente aburre. Queda entonces una manera de recuperar el prestigio: morir."

"There comes a time in life when, do whatever you do, you just get bored. Then there is way to recover prestige: to die."


Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999)

[Russell Nash]

To see men fall and die and not complain!
To taste the savage taste of blood -to be so devilish!
To gloat so over the wounds and deaths of the enemy.

[...] To meet life as a powerful conqueror...


From "A Song of Joys", Walt Whitman.

[Russell Nash]

Dark and terrible is the place to which she had carried the truth, and the lie —and I am going thither. At the very throne of Satan I shall overtake her, and falling on my knees will weep; and cry :

' Tell me the truth ! '

But God! This is also a lie. There, there is darkness, there is the void of ages and of infinity, and there she is not —she is nowhere. But the lie remains, it is immortal. I feel it in every atom of the air, and when I breathe, it enters my bosom with a hissing, and then rends it —yes, rends !

Oh ! what madness it is —to be man and to seek the truth ! What pain !

Help ! Help !


Leonid Andreyev, from "The Lie", published in "The Little Angel", Knopf, 1916.

----------------------------


You, too, wander about the graveyard silent and pensive. Your ear is conscious of the gentle echoes of deep groans and tears, while your eyes rest on rich monuments, and modest wooden crosses; and the unmarked tombs of strangers, covering their dead, who were strangers when living, unmarked, unobserved. And you read the inscriptions on the monuments, and all these people who have disappeared from the world rise up in your imagination. You see them young, laughing, loving; you see them hale, loquacious, insolently confident in the endlessness of life.

And they are dead.


Leonid Andreyev, from "Stepping-Stones", published in "The Little Angel", Knopf, 1916.

[Russell Nash]

The entrances or gates to the hells that are under the plains and valleys have different forms. Some of them are like the ones under the mountains, hills, and cliffs; some of them are like caves and caverns; some are like large chasms and quagmires, some like swamps; and some like stagnant ponds. [...] I have heard that evil spirits neither see nor feel this because when they are in it, they are in their element and therefore in the delight of their life.


Emanuel Swedenborg, "De Coelo et Inferno", 585 (1758).

[Russell Nash]

What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless 'Why?' and 'What next?'

We need writers who fear nothing.

The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy.

Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.


Yevgeny Zamyatin, from "Literature, Revolution, and Entropy", 1923.

[Russell Nash]

Night is coming and I am seized with unspeakable terror. Once I was strong and stood solidly on this earth, but now I am thrown into the void of boundless space. Great and terrible is my solitude, in which I, who live, feel, think and am unique, find myself—so small, insignificant, and weak and ready to be snuffed out at any moment. It is the threatening solitude in which I am a tiny fragment surrounded and choked by a dismal silence filled with mysterious enemies. Wherever I go I carry them within me; alone in the void of the universe, I am no friend to myself. Wild solitude in which I do not know who I am, in which my lips, my thought, my voice, belong to these enemies.


From "The Thought", by Leonid Andreyev, published in "Visions", Harcourt, 1987.

[Russell Nash]

“The Earth has a skin and that skin has diseases, one of its diseases is called man."


Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

[Russell Nash]

These flowers, which were splendid and sprightly,
Waking in the dawn of the morning,
In the evening will be a pitiful frivolity,
Sleeping in the cold night’s arms.


"To these Flowers", Pedro Calderón de la Barca

-------------------------------

For man's greatest crime is to have been born.


Pedro Calderón de la Barca