#sinister

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. ↗

— Orson Welles

#sinister #humor

Over the course of my life I've been to lots of places. Shadowed places where things have gone wrong. Sinister places where things still are. I always hate the sunlit towns, full of newly built developments with double-car garages in shades of pale eggshell, surrounded by green lawns and dotted with laughing children. Those towns aren't any less haunted than the others. They're just better liars. ↗

— Kendare Blake

#haunted #places #sinister #suburbia #life

The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (“The Medusa”) ↗

— Thomas Ligotti

#horror #insight #sinister #terror #insight

It is an interesting fact that during my tour I was never allowed access to computers, radios, or anything else that I might damage through curiosity, or perhaps something more sinister. ↗

— Robert B. Laughlin

#allowed #anything #computers #curiosity #damage

I may have taken someone through the wringer psychologically, but I've never been sinister. ↗

— John Mayer

#i #may #never #psychologically #sinister

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. ↗

— Agnes de Mille

#dancers #give #modern #our #portent