megairea reblogged
Rainer Maria Rilke, from Where Silence Reigns: Selected Prose; “The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke,"
[...] the expression on her face was ageless, haunting, as though she possessed in her lithe body an old soul that could not die; centuries in time looked out from those two eyes, she had contemplated life so long it had become indifferent to her.
Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel, 1951
Nothing can be as peaceful and endless as a long winter darkness, going on and on, like living in a tunnel where the dark sometimes deepens into night and sometimes eases to twilight, you’re screened from everything, protected, even more alone than usual. You wait and hide like a tree.
Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver (tr. by Thomas Teal), 1982
Roads? Who spoke of roads? We go by the moor and the hills, and tread granite and heather as the Druids did before us.
Daphne du Maurier, Jamaica Inn, 1936
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome, 1911
megairea reblogged
merricat funniest shirley jackson character
genuinely
I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.
Stephen King, Bag of Bones, 1998
[...] memories and dreams stood
around him, strong and fearless.
Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph (tr. by Walter Sorell & Denver Lindley), 1945
[...] that dripping loneliness of alien starless nights.
Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph (tr. by Walter Sorell & Denver Lindley), 1945
To be alone—the eternal refrain of life. It wasn’t better or worse than anything else. One talked too much about it. One was always and never alone. A violin, suddenly — somewhere out of a twilight—in a garden on the hills around Budapest. The heavy scent of chestnuts. The wind. And dreams crouched on one’s shoulders like young owls, their eyes becoming lighter in the dusk. A night that never became night. The hour when all women were beautiful.
Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph (tr. by Walter Sorell & Denver Lindley), 1945
We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.
Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph (tr. by Walter Sorell & Denver Lindley), 1945
I was in the land of the moon and I’ve come back, and here you are and you are life.
Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph (tr. by Walter Sorell & Denver Lindley), 1945
Everything becomes more colorful at night. Nothing appears difficult then, you think you are able to do anything, and what one cannot achieve is made up for by dreams.
Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph (tr. by Walter Sorell & Denver Lindley), 1945
They spoke little, it was too dark to speak.
Vladimir Nabokov, Mary, 1926
[He] felt that the murky twilight which was gradually seeping into the room was also slowly penetrating his body, transforming his blood into fog, and that he was powerless to stop the spell that was being cast on him by the twilight.
Vladimir Nabokov, Mary, 1926
She is your last and true and only love, he thought, and that’s not evil. It is only unfortunate.
Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees, 1950
megairea reblogged
Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One’s Own