❝ Innocence, on the Bicycle of Propriety, carrying the Urn of Reputation safely over the Abyss of Indiscretion ❞⠀—Edward Gorey, The Broken Spoke

❝ Sometimes, though, angels smoke in their sleeves. But when the archangel goes by, they throw their cigarettes away: this is what falling stars are. ❞⠀—Vladimir Nabokov, in a letter to his wife Véra

❝ Woods nymphs sprinkle your path with bowling balls while you dance and prowl in the sequined moonlight with leftover heads of lettuce. ❞⠀—The Surrealist Compliment Generator

❝ Champagne’s funny stuff. I'm used to whiskey. Whiskey is a slap on the back, and champagne’s a heavy mist before my eyes. ❞⠀—James Stewart as Macaulay Connor in The Philadelphia Story (1940)

❝ Gimme a whisky, ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy, baby. ❞⠀—Greta Garbo’s first line in her first talkie film, Anna Christie (1930)

❝ Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be. ❞⠀—André Breton, Mad Love

❝ Could we get this to sound a little more orchidy? Could we make that a little more tea rose? ❞⠀—Courtney Love using 💐 to describe the music she wanted for Live Through This

❝ From love's first kiss—to hell's abyss! ❞⠀—movie tagline for The Woman Suffers (1918)

❝ Now the story descends into a ruinous abyss with violent music. ❞⠀—Nobuhiko Obayashi's Emotion (1966)

❝ From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. ❞⠀—Edvard Munch ❀

❝ Get my swan costume ready. ❞⠀—Anna Pavlova’s final request before passing away

❝ I kept saying “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me,” because I had to get to the catwalk, but she just kept posing. So I pushed her. It was only a few stairs. ❞⠀—supermodel Lara Stone

❝ I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams on me. ❞⠀—Vladimir Nabokov, on Sigmund Freud

❝ I’ve got it all figured out. I’ll be unappreciated in my own country, but my gutsy blues stylings will electrify the French. I’ll avoid the horrors of drug abuse, but I do plan to have several torrid love affairs, and I may or may not die young. I haven’t decided. ❞⠀—Lisa Simpson

❝ In Egypt Saint Joseph said to Virgin: “Oh, my sweet young dear, could you not just for the moment shut your eyes and make believe that I am the Holy Ghost?” ❞⠀—Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag in Isak Dinesen’s The Deluge at Norderney

❝ In the ‘The Bell Jar,’ Plath profounds her enumerated existential parthenogenesis using subvertible intra-mural insight on the dissimulation of her classic bummer of the 20th century. ❞⠀—Lynda Barry, One! Hundred! Demons!

❝ Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations. ❞⠀—Orson Welles

❝ One time, as an excuse for undressing, Zelda pouted, “Oh dear, my slip is showing!” “You mean you're show is slipping, don't you, darling?” barked Tallulah. ❞⠀—Anita Loos, Cocktail Parties of the Twenties

❝ Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. ❞⠀—Voltaire

❝ Ouspenskaya used to fix the class with a very stern, rather frightening look, a monocle in one eye, and tell us to imagine we were blades of grass on the ocean bed. And everyone swayed. ❞⠀—Helen Beverley, on Maria Ouspenskaya as an acting teacher, in Nazimova: A Biography

❝ Pissing everywhere isn’t very Chanel. ❞⠀—Karl Lagerfeld

❝ The beauty of those swans! Of course, they’re angry beasts, like peacocks; but where peacocks are common, there’s nothing common about swans. The silence of their swimming... you don’t hear it, but you feel it. ❞⠀—Diana Vreeland, D.V.

❝ The idea of relativity makes many people fearful—the idea that you are one person with me today and another person with someone else later. ❞⠀—Wendy Dubow’s Conversations With Anaïs Nin

❝ Then she lifted the skull in both hands, and with it, she began to dance. ❞⠀—some paperback thriller

❝ We tried out various looks—angry! coy! confused! Sometimes I think the best you can ever feel in a photo shoot is like a sexy clown. ❞⠀—Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

❝ Why not a dish of five o'clock tea—here—soon—just you and me—knee to knee? ❞⠀—Fannie Hurst, in a letter to Alla Nazimova, Nazimova: A Biography

❝ Witch is never appropriate shorthand for grandmother. Use it anyway. ❞⠀—W. Todd Kaneko, Short Cuts

❝ You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. ❞⠀—Ray Bradbury?

❝ You’re looking very lovely, you know, in this damned moonlight. ❞⠀—Elyot Chase in Noël Coward’s Private Lives