• "Only I know that the beauty of your form and face are matched by the cruelty and ambition of your scheming heart."
• “The joy of gloom, the fondness for bathing one's temples in the dank night air and the musical delight of the screech owl's shriek.”
• "Whereas terror expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life, horror contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them."
• "Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail, and never get to try again... And some are given a chance to climb, but refuse... The climb is all there is. But they’ll never know this. Not until it’s too late."

Angela Carter, “The Company of Wolves”

• "[...] and they would sit and howl around her cottage for her, serenading her with their misery."
• "They are grey as famine, they are as unkind as plague"
• "It is midwinter and the robin, the friend of man, sits on the handle of the gardener’s spade and sings."
• "She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing."

Katherine Mansfield, "Bliss"

• "How idiotic civilisation is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?"

F. Scott Fitzgerald

• "Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."

Richard Siken

• "Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame."

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Black Cat"

• "One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; — hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; — hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; — hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin — a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it — if such a thing were possible — even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God."