For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:01]

You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:13]

Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:22]

She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, “Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:29]

And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:36]

But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:42]

You are afraid to die?'
Yes, everyone is.'
But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars when they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structures.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:51]

Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exists and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:56]

I can not help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:05]

Mademoiselle De Lafontaine – in right of her father, who was a German, assumed to be psychological, metaphysical and something of a mystic – now declared that when the moon shone with a light so intense it was well known that it indicated a special spiritual activity. The effect of the full moon in such a state of brilliancy was manifold. It acted on dreams, it acted on lunacy, it acted on nervous people; it had marvelous physical influences connected with life. Mademoiselle related that here cousin, who was mate of a merchant ship, having taken a nap on deck on such a night, lying on his back, with his face full in the light of the moon, had wakened, after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features horribly drawn to one side; and his countenance had never quite recovered its equilibrium.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:11]

Knowledge is power-and power of one sort or another is the secret lust of human souls; and here is, beside the sense of exploration, the undefinable interest of a story, and above all, something forbidden, to stimulate the contumacious appetite.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:21]

Women are so enigmatical – some in everything – all in matters of the heart. Don't they sometimes actually admire what is repulsive?... More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:28]

I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:44]

Places change imperceptibly – in detail, at least – a good deal,' said the Doctor, making an effort to keep up a conversation that plainly would not go on itself; 'and people too; population shifts – there's an old fellow, sir, they call Death.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:50]

No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:56]

Boating, my dear Mrs. Bedel, is the dullest of all things; don't you think so? Because a boat looks very pretty from the shore, we fancy that the shore must look very pretty from a boat; and when we try it, we find we have only got down into a pit and can see nothing rightly. For my part, I hate boating and I hate the water...More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:08]

“What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances that satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative. These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us, and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see, and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible power.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:57]

There is a faculty in man that will acknowledge the unseen. He may scout and scare religion from him; but if he does, superstition perches near.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:08]

There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a strange fear and elation – an ascent above the reach of life's expectations or companionship, and the tremblings of a wild and undefined misgivings.”More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [12/03/2011 02:12:14]

But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [03/29/2018 05:03:36]

but curiosity is a restless and scrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [03/29/2018 05:03:36]

There is no dealing with great sorrow as if it were under the control of our wills. It is a terrible phenomenon, whose laws we must study, and to whose conditions we must submit, if we would mitigate it.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [03/29/2018 05:03:36]

How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long - the care of cares - the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven - and straight you find a new stratum there.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [03/29/2018 05:03:36]

There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [03/29/2018 05:03:36]

You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.More Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [03/29/2018 05:03:36]