❝ Innocence, on the Bicycle of Propriety, carrying the Urn of Reputation safely over the Abyss of Indiscretion ❞⠀

• edward gorey
  • the broken spoke

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❝ 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

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❝ 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)

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❝ Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be. ❞

• andré breton
  • mad love

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❝ 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

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❝ 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)

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❝ From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. ❞

• ❀ edvard munch ❀

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❝ Get my swan costume ready. ❞

• anna pavlova’s final request before passing away

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❝ 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)

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❝ 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

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❝ 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

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❝ 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

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❝ 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

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❝ 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!

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❝ Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations. ❞

• orson welles

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❝ 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

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❝ Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. ❞

• voltaire

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❝ 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
  • nazimova: a biography

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❝ Pissing everywhere isn’t very Chanel. ❞

• karl lagerfeld

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❝ 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.

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❝ 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

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❝ Then she lifted the skull in both hands, and with it, she began to dance. ❞

• some paperback thriller

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❝ 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

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❝ 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

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❝ Witch is never appropriate shorthand for grandmother. Use it anyway. ❞

• w. todd kaneko
  • short cuts

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❝ 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

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❝ You’re looking very lovely, you know, in this damned moonlight. ❞

• elyot chase in noël coward’s private lives