[ perfume ] 💦 — ❝ Inside every dressing room was a metallic tank with a pump spray attached, and just before the performance the actresses would take a jag, their maids spraying them with their scent for three minutes. Three whole minutes.

• Eleanor Christie, playing Intoxication, was prescribed ambergris, the whale emission, and reported success. “It is as though she has drunk five quarts of champagne, yet she still retains full control of all her senses,” noted the journalist. Frances Richards, as Slander, found that a lemon perfume “makes her hate everyone when she is on stage.” Florence Short, or Passion, was given frankincense and myrrh, which Professor Roodhouse said was Cleopatra’s perfume; he explained that “she has to drink two glasses of ice water in order to counteract the effects every night when she is through with her scene where she tempts Youth.” ❞
  • ㅤ
    • —Lizzie Ostrom's Perfume: A Century of Scents

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[ a dream ] 🔥 — ❝ Since this was the first time her words had ever been directed to me, I became so ecstatic that, like a drunken man, I turned away from everyone and I sought the loneliness of my room, where I began thinking of this most gracious lady and, thinking of her, I fell into a sweet sleep, and a marvelous vision appeared to me. I seemed to see a cloud the color of fire and, in that cloud, a lordly man, frightening to behold, yet he seemed also to be wondrously filled with joy. He spoke and said many things, of which I understood only a few; one was Ego dominus tuus. [“I am thy master.”] I seemed to see in his arms a sleeping figure, naked but lightly wrapped in a crimson cloth; looking intently at this figure, I recognized the lady of the greeting, the lady who earlier in the day had deigned to greet me. In one hand he seemed to be holding something that was all in flames, and it seemed to me that he said these words: Vide cor tuum. [“Behold thy heart.”] And after some time had passed, he seemed to awaken the one who slept, and he forced her cunningly to eat of that burning object in his hand; she ate of it timidly. A short time after this, his happiness gave way to bitterest weeping, and weeping he folded his arms around this lady, and together they seemed to ascend toward the heavens. At that point my drowsy sleep could not bear the anguish that I felt; it was broken and I awoke. ❞

• —Dante Alighieri ▸
  • The New Life

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[ blood suck ] 🦇 — ❝ O Dracula, unlikely hero! O flying leukemia, in your cloak like a living umbrella, a membrane of black leather which you unwind from within yourself and lift like a stripteaser's fan as you bend with emaciated lust over the neck, flawless and bland, of whatever woman is longing for obliteration, here and now in her best negligée. ❞

• —Margaret Atwood
  • My Life As a Bat

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[ books ] 📚 — ❝ There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag—and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty—and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. ❞

• —Doris Lessing
  • The Golden Notebook

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[ dialectic ] ↻ — ❝ You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy. The strange tableau in the closet behind the bathroom: the feast, the beast, and the jelly-bean. Recall, remember: please do not die again. Let there be continuity at least—a core of consistency—even if your philosophy must be always a moving dynamic dialectic. The thesis is the easy time, the happy time. The antithesis threatens annihilation. The synthesis is the consummate problem. ❞

• —Sylvia Plath
  • Unabridged Journals

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[ dolls ] 🎀 — ❝ After a while she went back down the steps and stopped at the shop window full of dolls. Some were clothed, others were naked; some were dressed in picturesque peasant costumes or complicatedly romantic outfits complete with gloves, hats and parasols. Some represented girls and others grown women. The features of some were crude, others were childish, ingenuous, perverse. Their arms and hands were frozen in diverse positions, as if surprised by the cold wind of all time that had passed since their owners abandoned or sold them, or died. Girls who became women, thought Julia—some beautiful, some plain, who had loved or perhaps been loved—had once caressed those bodies made of rags, cardboard and porcelain. Those dolls had survived their owners. They were dumb, motionless witnesses whose imaginary retinas still retained the images of scenes long since erased from the memories of the living: faded pictures sketched among mists of nostalgia, intimate moments of family life, children’s songs, loving embraces, as well as tears and disappointments, dreams turned to ashes, decay and sadness, perhaps even to evil. There was something unbearably touching about that multitude of glass and porcelain eyes that stared at her unblinking, full of the Olympian knowledge that only time possesses, lifeless eyes embedded in pale wax or papier-mâché faces, above dresses so darkened by time that the lace edgings looked dull and grubby. And then there was the hair, some combed and neat, some dishevelled, real hair—the thought made her shiver—that had belonged to real women.❞

• —Arturo Pérez-Reverte
  • The Flanders Panel

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[ folly ] 🍇 — ❝ He played with the idea and grew willful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary improvisation. He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give his wit keenness and to lend colour to his imagination. He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. He charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they followed his pipe, laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes. ❞

• —Oscar Wilde
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray

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[ full album title ] ♙ — ❝ When the pawn hits the conflicts he thinks like a king / What he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fight / And he'll win the whole thing 'fore he enters the ring / There's nobody to batter when your mind is your might / So when you go solo you hold your own hand / And remember that depth is the greatest of heights / And if you know where you stand then you know where to land / And if you fall it won't matter 'cause you'll know that you're right. ❞

• —Fiona Apple

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[ gourmet ] 🐦 — ❝ Oh! doff, then, thy waistcoat of vine-leaves, pretty rover! and show me that bosom more delicious even than woman’s. What gushes of rapture! What a flavour! How peculiar! Even how sacred! Heaven at once sends both manna and quails. Another little wanderer! Pray follow my example! Allow me. All Paradise opens! Let me die eating ortolans to the sound of soft music. ❞

• —Benjamin Disraeli
  • The Young Duke

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[ Lo speaks ] 😒 — ❝ “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” Oh no, not again. “My sin, my soul.” (incredulity, exasperation) “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.” Cut it out! “Lo. Lee. Ta.” Pulease, leave me alone, will you. “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.” For Christ's sake, leave me alone. “She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line.” I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. “But in my arms she was always Lolita.” Don’t touch me. I’ll die if you touch me. ❞

• —Vladimir Nabokov
  • actual quotes spliced from Lolita

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[ meow! ] 🐈 — ❝ There was also a Scandinavian version of the ever famous story which Sir Walter Scott told to Washington Irving, which Monk Lewis told to Shelley [...] the story of the traveller who saw within a ruined abbey, a procession of cats, lowering into a grave a little coffin with a crown upon it. Filled with horror, he hastened from the spot; but when he reached his destination, he could not forbear relating to a friend the wonder he had seen. Scarcely had the tale been told when his friend’s cat, who lay curled up tranquilly by the fire, sprang to its feet, cried out, ‘Then I am the King of the Cats!’ and disappeared in a flash up the chimney. ❞

• —Stephen Vincent Benét
  • The King of Cats

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[ modernist flowers ] 💐 — ❝ Yellow roses she bought with her money like Empire satin brocade, and white lilacs and pink tulips like moulded confectioner’s frosting, and deep-red roses like a Villon poem, black and velvety as an insect wing, cold blue hydrangeas clean as a newly calcimined wall, the crystalline drops of lily of the valley, a bowl of nasturtiums like beaten brass, anemones pieced out of washed material, and malignant parrot tulips scratching the air with their jagged barbs, and the voluptuous scrambled convolutions of Parma violets. She bought lemon-yellow carnations perfumed with the taste of hard candy, and garden roses purple as raspberry puddings, and every kind of white flower the florist knew how to grow. She gave Madame gardenias like white kid gloves and forget-me-nots from the Madeleine stalls, threatening sprays of gladioli, and the soft, even purr of black tulips. She bought flowers like salads and flowers like fruits, jonquils and narcissus, poppies and ragged robins, and flowers with the brilliant carnivorous qualities of Van Gogh. ❞

• —Zelda Fitzgerald
  • Save Me the Waltz

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[ never ] 🎸 — ❝ People often ask me about groupies on tour, about whether I had random and meaningless and super-hot sex. The answer is no. To all of it. We never had groupies. Writing that sad little sentence, I wish we had, just so instead I could have written, “Yes, of course we had groupies! Endless, countless numbers of groupies. A cornucopia of groupies, groupies coming out of my ears, groupies for days.” ❞

• —Carrie Brownstein
  • Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

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[ swoon ] 💋 — ❝ He kissed her.

• A kiss about apple pie à la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven’t eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the Strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs. ❞
  • ㅤ
    • —Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat

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[ vile bodies ] ◈ — ❝ He had breakfasted in a world of phantoms, in a great room full of uncomprehending eyes, protruding grotesquely from monstrous heads that lolled over steaming porridge; marionette waiters had pirouetted about him with uncouth gestures. All round him a macabre dance of shadows had reeled and flickered, and in and out of it Adam had picked his way, conscious only of one insistent need, percolating through to him from the world outside, of immediate escape from the scene upon which the bodiless harlequinade was played, into a third dimension beyond it. ❞

• —Evelyn Waugh
  • The Balance