Arthur Machen Quotes

If we try to deny the darkness in our souls then we'll become completely dark.

I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell.

You can't play Batman in a serious, square-jawed, straight-ahead way without giving the audience the sense that there's something behind that mask waiting to get out, that he's a little crazed; he's strange.

I'm both kinds of a person; I have a side of me that's very light and very optimistic and finds everything surreal and hilarious, and then I have a side of me that's - I don't know what the right word is - tormented or just feels very overwhelmed.

All of us have darkness inside us, and at times it possesses and seduces us in ways we never thought possible.

Each of us has heaven and hell in him.

The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.

I think the Bhagavad Gita is about both the forces of light and the forces of darkness that exist within our own self, within our own soul; that our deepest nature is one of ambiguity. We have evolutionary forces there - forces of creativity, and love, and compassion, and understanding. But we also have darkness inside us - the diabolical forces of separation, fear and delusion. And in most of our lives, there is a battle going on within ourselves.

The madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up.

What does it mean when nightmares dream of peace? When shadows wish for light?

The price we paid for the volumes of ourselves that we suffocated in the dark.

The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, reallyshow very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves.

Every man is two men; one is awake in the darkness, the other asleep in the light.

What's madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall, That place among the rocks--is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have........ ....... Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, Keeps buzzing at the sill. ~From "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke

In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice... No one can live in the light all the time.

There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us... It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts.

i'm going mad, i told myself. let me not be mad.

I turned myself to face me, but I've never caught a glimpse of how the others must see the faker.

They were seeking out the treasure of their destiny, without actually wanting to live out their destiny.

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most

I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink in sulphur-colored mists. Madness conquers. I can no longer put my mosaics together. I just cry and laugh.

Losing innocence. Remembering Heaven. That was the essence of Hell

The shining. It was a good name, a comforting name, because she had always thought of it as a dark thing.

I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.