Damned Quotes

“A procession of the damned: By the damned I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed will march. You'll read them, or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags. They'll go by, like you could, arm-in-arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will foot little harlots. Many are clowns, but many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices, whims and amiabilities, the naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound, and the puerile. A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety. The ultra-respectable! But the condemned, anyway.”

“A procession of the damned: By the damned I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed will march. You'll read them, or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags. They'll go by, like you could, arm-in-arm with the spirit of anarchy. Here and there will foot little harlots. Many are clowns, but many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices, whims and amiabilities, the naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound, and the puerile. A stab and a laugh and the patiently folded hands of hopeless propriety. The ultra-respectable! But the condemned, anyway.”

“For what can the damned really have to say to the damned?”

“If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves.”

“The aggregate appearance is of dignity and dissoluteness. The aggregate voice is a defiant prayer. But the spirit of the whole is processional. The power, that has said to all these things that they are damned, is dogmatic science. But they'll march! The little harlots will caper and the freaks will distract the attention and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries. But the solidity of the procession as a whole, the solidity of things which pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on coming, the irresistibleness of things that neither threaten, nor jeer, nor defy, but arrange themselves in mass formations that pass and pass and keep on passing. So, by the damned, I mean the excluded.”

“There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.”

“There was an old hen And she had a wooden leg And every damned morning She laid another egg She was the best damned chicken On the whole damned farm - And another little drink Wouldn't do us any harm.”

“Laughter's all the damned thing's fit for.”

“In reality, the damned are in the same place as the saved—in reality! But they hate it; it is their Hell. The saved love it, and it is their Heaven. It is like two people sitting side by side at an opera or a rock concert: the very thing that is Heaven to one is Hell to the other. Dostoyevski says, 'We are all in paradise, but we won’t see it'…Hell is not literally the 'wrath of God.' The love of God is an objective fact; the 'wrath of God' is a human projection of our own wrath upon God, as the Lady Julian saw—a disastrous misinterpretation of God’s love as wrath. God really says to all His creatures, 'I know you and I love you' but they hear Him saying, 'I never knew you; depart from me.' It is like angry children misinterpreting their loving parents’ affectionate advances as threats. They project their own hate onto their parents’ love and experience love as an enemy—which it is: an enemy to their egotistic defenses against joy…Since God is love, since love is the essence of the divine life, the consequence of loss of this life is loss of love...Though the damned do not love God, God loves them, and this is their torture. The very fires of Hell are made of the love of God! Love received by one who only wants to hate and fight thwarts his deepest want and is therefore torture. If God could stop loving the damned, Hell would cease to be pure torture. If the sun could stop shining, lovers of the dark would no longer be tortured by it. But the sun could sooner cease to shine than God cease to be God...The lovelessness of the damned blinds them to the light of glory in which they stand, the glory of God’s fire. God is in the fire that to them is Hell. God is in Hell ('If I make my bed in Hell, Thou art there' [Ps 139:8]) but the damned do not know Him.”

“Tempestuous plains tell the tale,Windswept wastes do bewail,Haunting Spirit of the land,Seeks the living, seeks the damned.Horizoned edge sheared with grass, Dark Storm Rising in the pass,Ageless Spirit seeks the path,To torment souls to the last.Brooding Spirit upon the plain,Thunderhead gathers for the rain. Light grows dim then bolts with pain,On dry Earth her sin is stained.(Frightened creatures do stampede,Into night, they do recede).Ungodded hand on seasoned blade,Reaps the harvest of the Age.Released from her eternal din,Spirit of the Age rises again.Seeking to plunder and consume, Those who were proud, those who presumed.Spirits rage while storm draws nigh,Upon burning plain and emblazoned sky.It is said giants grapple in the Earth so deep,To contend for souls that they might keep. The Storm spirit now searches the high and the low,To seek her manchild victim in the fields below.Leaves bad wasteland to claim but a fallen man,Denying it Heaven, crowning it, ‘Son of the Damned.’Treacherous Spirit of the far lost night, Tramples souls down denying them light.Storm seethes with furious hiss,Leads men on to bottomless pit.This most ancient of foes has come from her den,To seek the living, to make ready those dead. A living sacrifice is her soul desire,To snatch the soul for black funeral pyre.A double-damned devil, that is she,This one who lies, who claims to make free.A lying spirit, that is her domain, A storm-wracked Fury of self-proclaim.Onward she seeks, this bleak Northern wind,Searching for naught but for a soul akin.Amidst the howling and the rage,To murder again, that is her trade. As this spirit of graves left the plain,She left a wake of dead in shrouded train. Now down from the plain Storm did come,Unto those cities wherein was no sun.There with whirlwind she did rip and scour, For those souls of whom she could tear and devour.She comes to seek the living and the dead,Those who were frightened, those with no dread.Thus upon those she did acclaim,“I am the Mistress of the living and the slain.” O’ haunting Spirit of this land,Taker of life, maker of the damned. --On Villainess Storm, Ch. One Valley of the Damned”

“In saving Tamlin, I was to damn myself.”