#imagery

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#horror #imagery #imagination #macabre #supernatural

For mile after mile the same melodic phrase rose up in my memory. I simply couldn’t get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed to become more and more intricately woven, as if to conceal from the listener how eventually it would end. This weaving and re-weaving became so complicated that one wondered how it could possibly be unravelled; and then suddenly one note would resolve the whole problem, and the solution would seem yet more audacious than the procedures which had preceded, called for, and made possible its arrival; when it was heard, all that had gone before took on a new meaning, and the quest, which had seemed arbitrary, was seen to have prepared the way for this undreamed-of solution. ↗

— Claude Lévi-Strauss

#music #music

What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round. ↗

— Thomas Bailey Aldrich

#happiness #imagery #seasons #twitter

It was not a great presence but a great absence, a geometric ocean of darkness that seemed to swallow heaven itself. ↗

— Laura Hillenbrand

#zeppelin #world-war-ii

I'm perplexed, though, by your application of the term 'negative' to my figural imagery. ↗

— Brian Ferneyhough

#i #imagery #negative #perplexed #term

Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male? ↗

— Carol P. Christ

#device #does #even #everyone #god

When you read a novel, your own imagery is the most important. It's what makes reading such a wonderful thing. ↗

— Daniel Craig

#important #makes #most #novel #own

Photography suits the temper of this age - of active bodies and minds. It is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively, accurately. ↗

— Edward Weston

#active #acts #age #bodies #decisively

They had painted a lady leaning her arms on the sill of the window. This lady was waiting for a husband. Her flesh was slack and she was some forty-five years old. Perhaps she had been waiting since she was fifteen. A rose and mauve lady that had not yet gathered her flesh and her beauty into dark clothes, and still waited, like a rose stripped of its petals, with her faded colors and her artificial smile, bitter as a grimace. ↗

— Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio

#bitterness #imagery #love #age

I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me. ↗

— Margaret Mahy

#am #anyone #copy #else #find