Quotes from Arthur Machen

ET DAIBOLUS INCARNATE EST. ET HOMO FACTUS EST.

Mary kept down the housekeeping bills to the very best of her ability, but meat was always dear, and she suspected the maid of cutting surreptitious slices from the joint and eating them in her bedroom with bread and treacle in the dead of night, for the girl had disordered and eccentric appetites.

Unlike Dyson, he [Phillipps] walked fast, with his eye on the pavement, absorbed in his thoughts, and oblivious of the life around him; and he could not have told by what streets he had passed, when he suddenly lifted up his eyes and found himself in Leicester Square.

Long suffering had nearly annihilated all my ordinary powers of mind. I was an imbecile—an idiot.

I have always been fond of diving into Queer Street for my amusement, and I found my knowledge of that locality and its inhabitants very useful. It

I shuddered at the idea of this incarnate fiend, whose soul is black with shocking crimes, mingling free and unobserved amongst the harmless crowds, meditating perhaps a new and more fearful cycle of infamies. I tell you, sir, that an awful being stalks through the streets, a being before whom the sunlight itself should blacken, and the summer air grow chill and dank.

If Roberts had been a poet or a painter or a musician; we might have had a masterpiece. As he was neither: we had a monster

As I glanced up I had looked straight towards the last house in the row before me, and in an upper window of that house I had seen for some short fraction of a second a face. It was the face of a woman, and yet it was not human.

His school-fellows thought him quite mad, and tolerated him, and indeed were very kind to him in their barbarous manner.

A superfície não crê no cubo ou na esfera.

There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.

It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit.

I have been grinding away at facts for thirty years; it is time for fancies.

Because of the hand, the sign of the mano in fica. That gesture is now only used by Italians.

As far as I can make out modern Protestantism believes that Heaven is something like Evensong in an English cathedral, the service by Stainer and the Dean preaching. For those opposed to dogma of any kind — even the mildest — I suppose it is held that a Course of Ethical Lectures will be arranged.

Villiers, that woman, if I can call her a woman, corrupted my soul. The night of the wedding I found myself sitting in her bedroom in the hotel, listening to her talk. She was sitting up in bed, and I listened to her as she spoke in her beautiful voice, spoke of things which even now I would dare not whisper in the blackest night, though I stood in the midst of a wilderness.

There was something about Herbert which shocked him inexpressibly; not his poor rags nor the marks which poverty had set upon his face, but rather a indefinite terror which hung about him like a mist.

With a touch I can bring them into play, with a touch, I say, I can set free the current, with a touch I can complete the communication between this world of sense and—we shall be able to finish the sentence later on. Yes, the knife is necessary; but think what that knife will effect. It will level utterly the solid wall of sense, and probably, for the first time since man was made, a spirit will gaze on a spirit-world. Clarke, Mary will see the god Pan!

And thus, as a closer and still intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

The saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall.

Lucian pigeon-holed the letter solemnly in the receptacle lettered "Barbarians.

and suddenly, it seemed, he lay in the sunlight, beautiful with his olive skin, dark haired, dark eyed, the gleaming bodily vision of a strayed faun.

Otuz y?ld?r," diye devam etti, "gerçeklerle boÄŸuÅŸuyorum; ÅŸimdi düÅŸ zaman?.

Ama yaln?zca çok az ÅŸey biliyorum; bir uçuruma bakm?? ve dehÅŸet içinde bak??lar?n? kaç?rm?? bir gezgin gibiyim.