[derangedrhythms]

...enduring the sun’s enmity...

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

[derangedrhythms]

In all this there was a strangeness that attracted and enchanted me.

Mary Shelley, Matilda

[derangedrhythms]

This angel appeared as a hart and was past them in a single bound, its tail streaming fire like a comet.

James Blish, Black Easter

[derangedrhythms]

Pascale Petit, Mama Amazonica; from 'My Mother's Wedding Dress'

[derangedrhythms]

And all those cups are nothing but dried-up inkwells waiting for the demons to rise to the surface from the darkness of the ink, the infernal powers, the bogeymen, the hymns to the night, the flowers of evil, the hearts of darkness, or else for the melancholy angel to glide by that distills the humors of the soul and decants states of grace and epiphanies.

Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies; from 'I Also Try to Tell My Tale', tr. William Weaver

[derangedrhythms]

Theodore Roethke, The Far Field: Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical; from ‘In a Dark Time’

[derangedrhythms]

...I look to die and enter the foul lair of the occult occultress

Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972: The Shadow Texts; from ‘Psychopathology Ward’, tr: Yvette Siegert

[derangedrhythms]

The mythology and lore around hares was puzzling to me since it appeared to divide into extremes, with the hare a signifier of virtue, renewal and self-sacrifice on the one hand, and a witches’ familiar and harbinger of death, revenge or misfortune on the other. How, I wondered, could the same creature be both sacred and profane, chaste and promiscuous, lucky and unlucky; an emblem of self-sacrifice but also a witch in animal form; the embodiment of madness and foolishness but also wisdom?

Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare

[derangedrhythms]

And he sets the sea of my life steady, flooding it with the deep rich color of his mind and his love and constant amaze at his perfect being: as if I had conjured, at last, a god from the slack tides, coming up with his spear shining, and the cockleshells and rare fish trailing in his wake, and he trailing the world: for my earth goddess, he the sun, the sea, the black complement power: yang to yin.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath ⁠— 17th July 1957

[derangedrhythms]

From along the corridor the mirror spied on us. We found out (inevitably at such an hour) that there is something unnatural about mirrors.

Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths; from 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius', tr. Jorge Luis Borges & Norman Thomas di Giovanni

[derangedrhythms]

God will break your heart.

Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

[derangedrhythms]

...a raven-headed angel with a bright sword, astride a black wolf...

James Blish, Black Easter

[derangedrhythms]

Georg Trakl, Surrender to Night: Collected Poems of Georg Trakl: Poems; from 'Psalm', tr. Will Stone

[derangedrhythms]

My holy place is [him]. And it is an abomination.

Iris Murdoch, The Philosopher's Pupil

[derangedrhythms]

I am the angel who dwells in the point where lines fork. Whoever retraces the way of divided things encounters me, whoever descends to the bottom of contradictions runs into me, whoever mingles again what was separated feels my membraned wing brush his cheek!

Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies; from 'The Waverer's Tale', tr. William Weaver

[derangedrhythms]

...he never revealed how absolutely this man had taken possession of his soul.

Iris Murdoch, The Philosopher's Pupil

[derangedrhythms]

For the cards conceal more things than they tell...

Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies; from 'The Surviving Warrior's Tale', tr. William Weaver