As a boy, Poe suffered from night fears:

The superstitious skeptic, who could be terrified by his own imagination, later confessed to the editor George Graham that he 'disliked the dark, and was rarely out at night. On one occasion he said to me, "I believe that demons take advantage of the night to mislead the wary - although, you know," he added, "I don't believe in them."'

- Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, 1992

littleforest

From The White Cat by Robert Sans Souci

“The closest you will ever come in this life to an orderly universe is a good library.”

~ Ashleigh Brilliant

"I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly. As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial--if you remember them--and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting the pavement so hard they'd fly past my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try."

Thomasina Septimus, what is carnal embrace?

Septimus Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.

Thomasina When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

Septimus No.

Thomasina Well, I do. You cannot stir things apart.

Septimus No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it forever.

Childhood is a land entirely independent of everything. The only land where kings exist. Why go into exile? Why not grow older and more mature in this land?... Why get used to what others believe? Is there any more truth in that than in what one had believed with one's initial, strong child-faith? I can still remember... each thing having a particular meaning, and there were countless things. And none was worth more than any other. Justice reigned over them. There was a period when each thing seemed to be the only one, when every single one could become one's fate: a bird that flew in the night and now was sitting, dark and serious, in my favourite tree; a summer rain that transformed the garden so that all of its greenery seemed glazed with darkness and gleam; a book where a flower had been placed among the leaves, god knows by whom; a pebble of strange, interpretable shape: all of this was as if one knew much more of it than the grown-ups. It seems as if with each thing one could become happy and big but also as if one could perish on each thing...

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

"I'm trying to... I'm trying to think of an occasion when I could have said yes, I'm happy... Are you happy to be getting married, my mother stupidly asked me one day, are you at least happy to be getting married?... Why wouldn't I be, mother?

What do you mean, why wouldn't I be? You're either happy or you're not happy, what's why wouldn't I got to do with it?"

...

'If I'm who I am because I'm who I am and you're who you are because you're who you are, then I'm who I am and you're who you are. If, on the other hand, I'm who I am because you're who you are, and if you're who you are because I'm who I am, then I'm not who I am and you're not who you are...'

...

"Over dinner, Serge and Marc took the decision to try to rebuild a relationship destroyed by word and deed. At a certain moment, one of them used the expression 'trial period' and I burst into tears.

"This expression, 'trial period', applied to our friendship, set off in me an uncontrollable and ridiculous convulsion.

"In fact I can no longer bear any kind of rational argument, nothing formative in the world, nothing great or beautiful in the world has ever been born of rational argument."

~ Yasmina Reza, 'Art'

'My arse contemplates those who talk behind my back.'

- Picabia Francis