ALGERNON BLACKWOOD QUOTES

English author (1869-1951)

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Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their immediate neighbourhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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He found all religions uninteresting because, almost without exception, they start from the present and speculate ahead as to what men shall become, instead of looking back and speculating why men have got here as they are.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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Both flame and spider enrich themselves by understanding the natures of their prey; and fly and moth return again and again until this is accomplished.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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Any one who sits in reverie thus, of course, may see similar ridiculous pictures when the will no longer guides construction. The incongruities of dreams are thus explained.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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The Gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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The length of the day amazed me; it seemed endless. Time went another gait. The sequence of little happenings that marked its passage remains blurred in the memory, and I look back to these with the curious feeling that they happened all at once. Yet the strongest impression, perhaps, is that time, the sense of duration, was arrested or at least moved otherwise. There was a pause in Nature, the pause before the approaching Equinox. A river halted a moment at the bend. And hence came, of course, the sensation of pressure accumulating everywhere in the valley. Acceleration would come afterwards, but first this wondrous pause.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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I can work with passion because it is creative, but not with lust, for it is destructive only.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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Not easily may an individual escape the deep slavery of the herd.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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No man can describe to another convincingly wherein lies the magic of the woman who ensnares him.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

Tags: women

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Invention has ever imagination and poetry at its heart.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the walls of memory.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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And each, believing he was utterly and finally right, damned with equally positive conviction the rest of the world.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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For he did not realize that fear is simply suppressed desire, vivid signs of life, and that desire is the ultimate causative agent everywhere and always.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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To trace the unfamiliar to the familiar ... is to understand.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

Tags: understanding

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Ritual is the passage way of the soul into the Infinite.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

Tags: ritual

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But the wicked passions of men's hearts alone seem strong enough to leave pictures that persist; the good are ever too lukewarm.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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The spell of these terrible solitudes ... cannot leave any mind untouched, any mind, that is, possessed of the higher imaginative qualities.

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

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