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P E A R L
Originating in the medieval period, the Florilegium (or "a collection of flowers") is a compilation of excerpts. In their medieval use, they collected quotes from antiquity, most famously the writings of the Church Fathers. Past the medieval period, the term shifted to describe any general miscellany. While designed to be encompassing, the term's floral metaphor has lent well to compilations of botanical writings.
The quotes here, as with the rest of this site, pertain to my interests. They vary in their familiarity to you, and I hope to offer you more obscure finds amidst the household names. Most of them originate from a variety of webpages and naturally, my personal collection. The quote from Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa was transcribed by myself, shocked by the neglect of such a good passage.
If you'd like to see a more lighthearted collection, please see Lutzbug's truly monstrous 5,000-line-strong page over at lutzbug.neocities.org/quotes. I assembled these with a small army of scripts and our mutual taste for publicly-broadcasted insanity. Anything goes on there as long as it made us laugh or otherwise experience a glimmer of mirth for a moment. It's still being worked on as of writing, and I hope to get it up to 10,000 sometime.
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
— Ernest Hemingway, Letter (6 December 1924); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
"All that is dark, buried deep, unrevealed in the mind, should be manifested in a sort of physical projection, as real."
— Antonin Artaud
"and the universe said I love you because you are love"
— Julian Gough, End Poem
"By a far-reaching analogy, the dead are blamed for sickness and death: death comes, in other words, from the dead, who, through jealousy, anger, or longing, seek to bring the living into their realm. And to prevent this, the living attempt to neutralize or propitiate the dead — by proper funerary and burial rites, by 'killing' the corpse a second time, or by sacrifice — until the dead have become powerless. This is a condition which, worldwide, tends to correspond not just to when they stop entering one's dreams but also to when their bodies stop undergoing change and are reduced to inert bones. The bare skeleton — in our culture the very symbol of the terror of death — is in other cultures evidence that the dead body is finally safe and that the living are out of harm's way."
— Paul Barber, Vampires: Burial and Death, Folklore and Reality
Collapsed laughter running, falling, drifting, across the mine field of your thoughts dissolved, wondering: 'Who am I? Why should I be alone, alone?
— Ultimate Spinach, "Your Head Is Reeling"
Death and dissolution are not penalties inflicted on the living; they are themselves the conditions necessary to the existence of life and they hold all the hope of the future, as they have from the start.
— N. J. Berrill, You and the Universe (1958), p. 45
"Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home."
— Francis Bacon
Death is not the destruction of things that have been combined but the dissolution of their union. They say that change is death because the body is dissolved and life passes to the unseen. (Hear me devoutly) my dearest Hermes, when I say that the cosmos and the things said to be dissolved in this manner are changed because each day a part of the cosmos becomes unseen, (but) they are by no means dissolved. These are the passions of the cosmos, swirlings and concealments. The swirling is (a return), and the concealment is a renewal.
— Hermetica
Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.
— Ernest Hemingway
Even if you are not actually talking to a totally dead internet, even if you're not talking to an AI or some kind of script that's posting random stuff, you are, when you're interacting with people, um, oftentimes it's exactly the same.
— Luke Smith, YOU are the Dead Internet
Evenings were peaceful, smoke settling in the quiet air to soften the dusk, lights twinkling on the ridge we would camp on tomorrow, clouds dimming the outline of our pass for the day after. Growing excitement lured my thoughts again and again to the West Ridge… There was loneliness, too, as the sun set, but only rarely now did doubts return. Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find what I really sought was something I had left behind.
— Thomas F. Hornbein
"Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction"
— Pablo Picasso
"I can't see him but I can hear him chobbling and cleaning himself pmsl. It's like watching the film alien. When you know he's literally right next to you waiting for him to strike"
— My mom, trying to pinpoint one of our cats in a dark room.
"I love coming up with the stories and being creative and working with creative people and coming up with visuals and creating characters."
— Roberta Williams
"I love men too — not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no 'commandment of love.' I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them."
— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own
I never thought of him as a vampire, ever. I mean, the blood is the life. That's one thing you have to bear in mind. And it is for all of us, isn't it? Here's a man who is immortal. Here is a man who, through being immortal, is a lost soul. Here is a man who experiences the loneliness of evil, something he can't control, who wants to die but there is a force in him, a malefic force, which drives him to do these terrible things. I said earlier the character is heroic, based on the real man — a war leader and a national hero, I may say, in Romania to this day — Vlad the Impaler. Certainly a bloodthirsty character, without a doubt. I also told you that the character is romantic — so he is, as far as women are concerned, and erotic. And there's, of course, the obvious association with the bite in a sexual sense, if you like. So I tried to put all those particular characteristics into the character. It appears that I succeeded.
— Christopher Lee, interview (1990)
I'm not a morbid person, but I thought about death—or more precisely, how strangely tilted our view of life is. We know the universe went on before for billions of years and it will go on for billions more. There's just this brief stretch when the window is opened before our eyes, and the world is visible. Then the window is shut, forever.
— Richard Chwedyk, The Measure of All Things (2001), in David G. Hartwell (ed.) Year's Best SF 7, p. 98
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
— Albert Camus, "Summer in Algiers", The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (1955)
"In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
— Henry Beston, The Outermost House
In a world where slaughter and vicious crimes are daily occurrences, a good ghoulish movie is comic relief.
— Vincent Price, as quoted in The New York Times News Service, "Vincent Price, Noted Actor Of Dark Roles, Dies at 82" (27 October 1993)
In reference to the divine work of creation and the plan of salvation within it, the alchemistic process was called the 'Great Work'. In it, a mysterious chaotic source material called materia prima, containing opposites still incompatible and in the most violent conflict, is gradually guided towards a redeemed state of perfect harmony, the healing 'Philosophers' Stone' or lapis philosophorum: "First we bring together, then we putrefy, we break down what has been putrified, we purify the divided, we unite the purified and harden it. In this way is One made from man and woman."
— Anonymous, Büchlein vom Stein der Weisen (1778)
Is there a better way to die than… to be watching a movie and then just drop dead?… with popcorn all over you…
— Vincent Price, Aspel & Co (1984)
It is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a cat.
— H. P. Lovecraft
Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die.
— Albert Camus
Mine is the night, with all her stars.
— Edward Young, Paraphrase on Job (1726), l. 147
"Passing away" is written on the world and all the world contains.
— Felicia Hemans, Passing Away, as reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)
Perhaps God made cats so that man might have the pleasure of fondling the tiger...
— Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks
* Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors ipsa.
The pomp of death alarms us more than death itself.
— Anonymous (Latin proverb)
"Sometimes I think the universe just waits for me to get cocky."
— Egon Spengler, The Real Ghostbusters
The kitten has a luxurious, Bohemian, unpuritanical nature. It eats six meals a day, plays furiously with a toy mouse and a piece of rope, and suddenly falls into a deep sleep whenever the fit takes it. It never feels the necessity to do anything to justify its existence; it does not want to be a Good Citizen; it has never heard of Service. It knows that it is beautiful and delightful, and it considers that a sufficient contribution to the general good. And in return for its beauty and charm it expects fish, meat, and vegetables, a comfortable bed, a chair by the grate fire, and endless petting.
— Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks
The reason good women like me and flock to my pictures is that there is a little bit of vampire instinct in every woman.
— Theda Bara, a.k.a. "The Vamp", attributed in Leta W. Clark, Women, Women, Women: Quips, Quotes, and Commentary (1977), p. 16
"There are all kinds of ghosts prowling these confused streets. They are the ghosts of monuments demolished — demolished by the Czech Reformation, demolished by the Austrian Counterreformation, demolished by the Czech Republic, demolished by the Communists. Even statues of Stalin have been torn down. All over the country, wherever statues were thus destroyed, Lenin statues have sprung up by the thousands. They grow like weeds on the ruins, like melancholy flowers of forgetting."
— Milan Kundera
There is nothing softer and weaker than water, and yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things. For this reason there is no substitute for it.
— Laozi
Timely not real-time. Rhythm not random. Moderation not excess. Knowledge not information. These are a few of the many characteristics of the Slow Web. It's not so much a checklist as a feeling, one of being at greater ease with the web-enabled products and services in our lives.
— Jack Cheng, The Slow Web
To depart while seated or standing is all one. All I shall leave behind me Is a heap of bones.
— Koho Kennichi, poem (1316)
"To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself."
— Anne Rice
"We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make money eventually. Then our writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. It is slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then, once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop. Or else they read the critics. If they believe the critics when they say they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote, sometimes it would be good and sometimes not so good and sometimes it would be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote. They weren't masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So now they cannot write at all. The critics have made them impotent."
— Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa
"When I shall be dead, the principles of which I am composed will still perform their part in the universe, and will be equally useful in the grand fabric, as when they composed this individual creature. The difference to the whole will be no greater betwixt my being in a chamber and in the open air. The one change is of more importance to me than the other; but not more so to the universe."
— David Hume, On Suicide
"When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled."
— Charles Darwin