Kelley Frank > Kelley's Quotes

“We become aware of the void as we fill it.”
― Antonio Porchia

“Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants something, so do superior people respect the superior animal which lives its own life and knows that the puerile stick-throwings of alien bipeds are none of its business and beneath its notice. The dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. That pleases a meekness-loving peasant who relishes a stimulus to his self importance. The cat, on the other hand, charms you into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in the humour. That is personality and individuality and self-respect -- the calm mastery of a being whose life is its own and not yours -- and the superior person recognises and appreciates this because he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his own heritage and aesthetic sense.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Temple

“I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Rats in the Walls

“It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls-as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself.”
― Stephen King, Pet Sematary

“When their desire to heal is met with information, skilled support, and a safe environment, they begin to grow in ways they never dreamed possible. The sad thing is that not all survivors have access to these conditions.”
― Laura Davis, Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Is a Survivor of Child Sexual Abuse

“The healing process is best described as a spiral. Survivors go through the stages once, sometimes many times; sometimes in one order, sometimes in another. Each time they hit a stage again, they move up the spiral: they can integrate new information and a broader range of feelings, utilize more resources, take better care of themselves, and make deeper changes.”
― Laura Davis, Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Is a Survivor of Child Sexual Abuse

“If you feel happy, enjoy it, because happiness doesn’t last forever. The nature of feelings is that they change. Go with the shifts in your own emotional rhythm.”
― Laura Davis, Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Is a Survivor of Child Sexual Abuse

“Sometimes if we go deep enough into our pain, it changes into something else.”
― Laura Davis, Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Is a Survivor of Child Sexual Abuse

“When you love someone whose healing is leading her to challenge abuse in the world, you either support her in that effort or you stand in the way. If you really want to support the survivor’s healing, join her in fighting back.”
― Laura Davis, Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Is a Survivor of Child Sexual Abuse

“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.”
― Carl Sagan

“Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

“There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion, even by the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

“There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

“It was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. It's pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the note orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to harken to the sound and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observes that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as in confessed revery or meditation”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

“With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

“So violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

“Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“The true secret in being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock on the witch's door when she is already away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a very long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“When I was alive, I believed — as you do — that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said 'one o'clock' as though I could see it, and 'Monday' as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekends and New Year's Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls. (...) You can strike your own time, and start the count anywhere. When you understand that — then any time at all will be the right time for you.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“I am what I am. I would tell you what you want to know if I could, for you have been kind to me. But I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, although I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die. I am not like the others now, for no unicorn was ever born who could regret, but I do. I regret.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“It’s a rare man who is taken for what he truly is.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Take me with you. For laughs, for luck, for the unknown. Take me with you.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Marveling at his own boldness, he said softly, "I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Whatever can die is beautiful — more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world. Do you understand me?”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“You were the one who taught me," he said. "I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling. I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn