Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
But as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
The tales of Elfland do not stand or fall on their actuality but on their truthfulness, their speaking to the human condition, the longings we all have for the Faerie Other.
He will one day meet his true love... A fellow traveler on the road... Her eyes will be his ocean... In her ocean he will sail forever....
...what happens tomorrow is the future but what happened yesterday is already part of on-going history...
To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death.
Our mind is a crazy nightclub of cacophonous sound filled with strange images and one-night stands: our mind tells us lonely, loveless tales that leave us frightened but really have no lasting power
A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.
The face of the dead man was concealed, of course, our customs not being those of the south, where corpses are carried to the grave in open coffins, that they might – one last time before slipping into the pit – be warmed by the light of the sun.
No matter how many romantic poems you recite, no matter how many glorious tales of love you read, how can you really understand the condition if you've never found yourself in it?
Methinks I see the sunset light flooding the river valley, the western hills stretching to the horizon, overhung with trees gorgeous and glowing with the tints of autumn -- a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.
God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.
Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.
... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both...
We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. I know, he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.
When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.
As his dark closet shows, Bluebeard was a collector at heart, and even after dispatching a wife, could not let her fully depart.
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation...
Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded...
Gina always believed there was magic in the world. "But it doesn't work in the way it does in fairy tales," she told me. "It doesn't save us. We have to save ourselves.
By God, if women had written stories, As clerks had within here oratories, They would have written of men more wickedness Than all the mark of Adam may redress.
