Dark Literary Quotations

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



 
"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)
 
"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)
 
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.
 
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.
 
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).
 
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.
 
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.
 
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
 
"As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth."
--Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)
 
Why to cling to fruitless fighting, if, at the end of the road, there is a deep grave and an infinite nothingness as a reward?


¿Por qué aferrarse en estériles luchas, si al final del camino se encuentra como todo premio un sepulcro profundo y una nada infinita?


Roberto Arlt
 
Genius? At this moment
A hundred thousand brains are dreaming they're geniuses like me,
And it may be that history won't remember even one...
...
Insane asylums are full of lunatics with certainties!


 Fernando Pessoa
 
The Poetry of Yannis Ritsos


HINTS: The Poetry of Yannis Ritsos


Clay: 26

Pieces of cotton
not for the wound—
as evening falls
resplendent—
for the mouth
for the ears
for the eyes.

Athens—January 18, 1978

Lots: 4

A pregnant woman
at the window
below the window
the sea
with scattered lemons
with drowning victims.
from Lots (1977)

Night

Tall eucalyptus trees and a wide moon.
A star shimmers on the water.
The heavens white, silver.
Stones, ravaged stones, all the way up.
Nearby, in the shallows, a fish
is heard jumping, a second, a third . . .
Grand, ecstatic orphanage — freedom.

October 21, 1968
Partheni concentration camp

Epilogue

Life? — a wound in non-existence.

July 27, 1968
Partheni concentration camp

Aging

Saturday, Sunday, Saturday again—and before you know it, Monday.
A quiet dusk without color, or trees, or chairs.
We have nothing to spend. The old pitcher on the dinner table;
the plates, the glasses, the sad hands, the deserted—
the spoon rises; another mouth finds it—but which mouth?
Who eats? Who grows quiet? In the open window
a small, forgotten moon swallows its own spit.
It's not that we're no longer growing fat, but that we're no longer hungry.

June 4, 1968
Partheni concentration camp

Clay: 6

The shoes of the dead
in all sizes
you tried them all—
and all at a very good price.


Athens—January 16, 1978

from Clay (1980)
 
"Como no me he preocupado de nacer, no me preocupo de morir."

"Since I have not been concerned with being born, I do not worry about dying."

Federico García Lorca
 
Heidegger considers the human condition coldly and announces that existence is humiliated. The only reality is "anxiety" in the whole chain of being. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man "in whom existence is concentrated." This professor of philosophy writes without trembling and in the most abstract language in the world that "the finite and limited character of human existence is more primordial than man himself." His interest in Kant extends only to recognizing the restricted character of his "pure Reason." This is to conclude at the end of his analyses that "the world can no longer offer anything to the man filled with anguish." This anxiety seems to him so much more important than all the categories in the world that he thinks and talks only of it. He enumerates its aspects: boredom when the ordinary man strives to quash it in him and benumb it; terror when the mind contemplates death. He too does not separate consciousness from the absurd. The consciousness of death is the call of anxiety and "existence then delivers itself its own summons through the intermediary of consciousness." It is the very voice of anguish and it adjures existence "to return from its loss in the anonymous They." For him, too, one must not sleep, but must keep alert until the consummation. He stands in this absurd world and points out its ephemeral character. He seeks his way amid these ruins.
Click to expand...
Camus (Myth, p. 18)
 
"I received life like a wound, and I have forbidden suicide to heal the scar. I want the Creator, every hour of his eternity , to contemplate its gaping crevasse. This is the punishment I inflict on him."

Comte de Lautréamont - Les Chants de Maldoror ( chant III).

(In french: "J’ai reçu la vie comme une blessure, et j’ai défendu au suicide de guérir la cicatrice. Je veux que le Créateur en contemple, à chaque heure de son éternité, la crevasse béante. C’est le châtiment que je lui inflige.")
 
THE HORROR-HORN by E.F. Benson

Amid the strains of Puccini, this is a Swiss hotel to match that of the sanatorium in the Swiss mountain snow of Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ (reviewed by me at length in 2013), and Benson has somehow turned one scene into the Swiss snowy mountain of a very effective horror story, perhaps expressing the human fears then of the bestial that many white men feared in those days, and which came out in history.
Benson removed the cannibalism of Mann (see passage quoted from the Mann below), and replaced it with the ripped-off hindleg of a chamois, shame!

***

“Scarcely daring to venture, but following an inner compulsion, he passed behind the statuary, and through the double row of columns beyond. The bronze door of the sanctuary stood open, and the poor soul’s knees all but gave way beneath him at the sight within. Two grey old women, witchlike, with hanging breasts and dugs of fingerlength, were busy there, between flaming braziers, most horribly. They were dismembering a child. In dreadful silence they tore it apart with their bare hands—Hans Castorp saw the bright hair blood-smeared—and cracked the tender bones between their jaws, their dreadful lips dripped blood. An icy coldness held him. He would have covered his eyes and fled, but could not. They at their gory business had already seen him, they shook their reeking fists and uttered curses—soundlessly, most vilely, with the last obscenity, and in the dialect of Hans Castorp’s native Hamburg. It made him sick, sick as never before. He tried desperately to escape; knocked into a column with his shoulder—and found himself, with the sound of that dreadful whispered brawling still in his ears,…”
– Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain — published in 1924 the same year as The Horror- Horn? The preternaturality of the literary gestalt!?)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top