assorted words

Main blog at @drakatzen

[drakonicwords]

This is a sideblog - my main is @drakatzen. This is where I'll post quotes from books that I'm (re)reading and store ones that I like - it's likely to skew somewhat academic, but there's plenty of fiction too.

My primary interests are linguistics (with a focus on historical linguistics, figurative language, and philology), history (particularly anything pre-early modern, likely focusing on the greater continent of Eurasia), archaeology, the natural world, mythology and folklore, fairies (and other spirits/figures from folklore), ghosts and other forms of the undead, magic and occultism, death (thanatology), fantasy literature, detective fiction, (gothic) horror, and the craft and art of language, storytelling, and writing overall. Expect a number of quotes concerning Old English, medieval literature, epics and sagas, folk beliefs, figurative language, monsters, ghosts, the uncanny, and so on.

Books quoted so far:

Roger B. Salomon, Mazes of the Serpent: An Anatomy of Horror Narrative (2002)

Filip Missuno, ‘Shadow’ and Paradoxes of Darkness in Old English and Old Norse Poetic Language (doctoral thesis, 2012)

Nancy Caciola, Afterlives: The Return of the Dead in the Middle Ages (2016)

[petaltexturedskies]

But now she loved winter. Winter was beautiful "up back"—almost intolerably beautiful. Days of clear brilliance. Evenings that were like cups of glamour—the purest vintage of winter's wine. Nights with their fire of stars. Cold, exquisite winter sunrise. Lovely ferns of ice all over the windows of the blue castle. Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings-torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long, white mistawis. Ice-grey twilights, broken by snow-squalls, when their cosy living-room, with its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats, seemed cosier than ever. Every hour brought a new revelation and wonder.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Blue Castle

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

He looked down from the height of the road on the huddled houses, saw the points of light start out suddenly from the cottages on the hillside beyond, and gazed at the long lovely valley fading in the twilight, till the darkness came and all that remained was the sombre ridge of the forest. The way was pleasant through the solemn scented lane, with glimpses of dim country, the vague mystery of night overshadowing the woods and meadows. A warm wind blew gusts of odour from the meadowsweet by the brook, now and then bee and beetle span homeward through the air, booming a deep note as from a great organ far away, and from the verge of the wood came the "who-oo, who-oo, who-oo" of the owls, a wild strange sound that mingled with the whirr and rattle of the night-jar, deep in the bracken. The moon swam up through the films of misty cloud, and hung, a golden glorious lantern, in mid-air; and, set in the dusky hedge, the little green fires of the glowworms appeared. He sauntered slowly up the lane, drinking in the religion of the scene, and thinking the country by night as mystic and wonderful as a dimly-lit cathedral.

– Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

[hamletofficial]

[ID: A quote in black text over a white background and highlighted in blue that reads: "What had Fabian found, woken, joined himself to in Greenhallow Wood? Something old, even older than the trees; something that should have been dead long ago." /end ID]

- Emily Tesh, Silver in the wood.

[herheadinfilmspodcast]

The Places of Marguerite Duras (Michelle Porte, 1976)

[antigonick]

“Night, ice, the still heart of Europe; a forest, lakes silver beneath a pattern of winter stars; a room, firelight, a shape slipping against the wall. He didn’t see his assassin, but he saw his shadow move.”

— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

[gennsoup]

If you don't believe in the occult, you can't guard against it.

Dorthe Nors, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

[funeral]

“Ghosts are a problem for historicism precisely because they disrupt our sense of linear teleology in which the consecutive movement of history passes untroubled through the generations” (14). They continue by pointing out that ghosts signal “the appearance of something in a time in which they clearly do not belong” (14). Humans like to think of time moving in a straight, ordered line with a clear distinction between past, present, and future…the ghost disrupts this desire for a well-ordered sense of time because it refuses to go away and stay in its proper time and place. In this way, ghosts respond to our own existential anxieties about time and death, our inability to control or fully understand either, and our nagging sense that categories like past, present, and future are not easily distinguishable from one another.

Ghostly Time in Lake Mungo

[hamletofficial]

The centrality of doors, thresholds and portals means that the notion of the between is crucial to the weird. It is clear that if Wells’ story [The door in the wall] had taken place only in the garden behind the wall, then no weird charge would have been produced. (This is why a feeling of the weird attaches to the lamppost at the edge of Narnia in C.S. Lewis’ stories, but not to Narnia proper.) If the story were set entirely beyond the door, we would be in the realm of the fantasy genre. This mode of fantasy naturalises other worlds. But the weird de-naturalises all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside.

– Mark Fisher, The weird and the eerie.

[hamletofficial]

[ID: A quote in black text over a white background that reads: “Time, so generous toward any petty star in the sky,

offered them a nearly empty hand

and quickly took it back, as if the effort were too much.

One step more, two steps more

along the glittering river

that sprang from darkness and vanished into darkness.” /end ID]

- Wisława Szymborska, Our ancestors' short lives. From View with a grain of sand. Selected poems.

[wordwhile]

“The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.”

— Herman Melville, Moby Dick

[wordwhile]

“Oh, I want to hold it all! … I want to hold the way the night is—cold without wind. And the way the stars are so near and shiny. I want to hold all of it tight until it hollers out, ‘Let me go! Let me go!’”

— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

[wordwhile]

When we are young, we make immoderate demands on those powers that steer existence. We want them to reveal themselves to us. The mysterious veil under which we have to live offends us; we demand to be able to control and correct the great world-machinery.

— Henrik Pontoppidan, Lucky Per, trans. by Naomi Lebowitz

[wordwhile]

To have something is to say one thing; to have someone who hears it is another. To be heard literally is to have the vibrations of the air travel through the labyrinth of the listener's ear to the mind, but more must unfold in that darkness. You choose to hear what corresponds to your desires, needs, and interests, and there are dangers in a world that corresponds too well, with curating your life into a mirror that reflects only the comfortable and familiar, and dangers in the opposite direction as well.

— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

“Mythos, in Greek,” said Borges, “is not a story that is false. It is a story that is more than true. Myth is a tear in the fabric of reality, and immense energies pour through these holy fissures. Our stories, our poems, are rips in this fabric as well, however slight.”

Jorge Luis Borges, quoted by Jay Parini in Borges and Me

[hamletofficial]

“Literate training encourages a heightened awareness of personal physical boundaries and a sense of those boundaries as the vessel of one’s self. To control the boundaries is to possess oneself. For individuals to whom self-possession has become important, the influx of a sudden, strong emotion from without cannot be an unalarming event, as it may be in an oral environment where such incursions are the normal conductors of most of the important information that a person receives.

When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat.

So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets record this struggle from within a consciousness—perhaps new in the world—of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.”

- Anne Carson, Eros the bittersweet.

[hamletofficial]

“Even what's long gone refuses to hold still, refuses to stabilize for the purposes of recording.”

- Katie Willingham, Staying power. From Unlikely designs.