But the world was a tomb to me, a graveyard of broken statues, and each of those statues resembled her face.
Your fall from grace and faith has been the fall of a century.
Maybe by some sublime miracle it is alive, Death, and it takes us into its arms, and it is no vampire, this thing, it is the very personification of the heavens. And we rise up and up into the stars with it. We go past the angels and the saints, past illumination itself and into the divine darkness, into the void, as we pass out of existence. In oblivion we are forgiven all things.
Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort. And the balance by which she lived might be upset if she were to question her own goodness.
Songs are everywhere you look, in the rain, in the wind, in the moan of the suffering, songs.
Civilizations rise and fall, my friend,’ I said. Old gods give way to new ones.
What had he done to become what he was? Could one so young so long ago have guessed the meaning of any decision, let alone the vow to become this?
If you are evil, how can voluptuousness and debauchery be your enemies? Don’t the world, the flesh, and the devil conspire equally against man?
Oh, not goodness again,” he said. “You and your malady of mortality, and your malady of goodness.
I am a wise God and a patient God,” He said. “I am the One who made you.” The images vanished.
Somber, yes, but light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns.
Beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and as lawless as it had been eons before man had a single coherent thought in his head.
The conflict lies between the morals of the artist and the morals of society, not between aesthetics and morality.
I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot.
I curse you,” and I felt it as if he’d declaimed it. “I offered myself to you at the moment you vanquished me,” he said. “Remember that when your dark children strike out at you, when they rise up against you. Remember me.
Dear God, this is love. This is desire. And all my past amours have been but the shadow of this.
We were on the Devil’s Road together before all this happened,” she said. “We’ll be on it soon again.
I couldn’t bear delving into his soul without his knowing it. Yet I couldn’t stop myself from sensing a vast secret terrain inside him, grimmer perhaps than I had ever dreamed, and his words came back to me that the darkness in him was like the darkness I’d seen at the inn, and that he tried to conceal it from me.
And everything I see when I look at you is utterly insubstantial. It is a commingling of tiny movements and indefinable colors as if you haven’t a body at all, but are a collection of heat and light. You are light itself, and what am I now? Eternal as I am, I curl like a cinder in that blaze.
I wanted darkness. To hide from her and the feelings that welled up in me, and the great consuming fear that I was utterly inadequate to make her happy, or to make myself happy by pleasing her.