Aesthetic Dark Quotes & Sayings

The neurotic preoccupied with his symptom is led to believe that his central task is one of confrontation with his particular obsession or phobia. In a sense his neurosis allows him to take control of his destiny - to transform the whole of life's meaning into the simplified meaning emanating from his self-created world. — Ernest Becker

I am in awe of Sam's decision to abandon capitals and punctuation but am not brave enough to do the same. I like to imagine the day he, as the Americans say, made the change he wished to see in the world. I like to think it came to him suddenly. Perhaps he was swimming - no, too active - or napping indoors on a hot day - no, too bourgeois - probably he was in Scotland during the midge season and he left the desk lamp on and the window open when he went out for a meaningful walk. It was dark and the midges were drawn to the lamplight and - thinking it was the moon - fried themselves against the bulb, falling in their tens and tens, cooked on the pages of Sam's poems. So when he returned some time later, with bites on his neck, he found his poems loaded with punctuation, asterisks, grammar lying dead on his manuscript and his instant reaction was disgust, a feeling that then infected his whole aesthetic. — Joe Dunthorne

I've always been drawn to a certain kind of dark aesthetic in cinema and in film, to what's abjected or considered abject. I've been tremendously influenced by noirish cinema whether that's Von Sternberg or Scorsese in the 70s or Lynch, etc. — Anton Yelchin

I really enjoy being with my fans. They offer great support and encouragement to me. I like signing autographs and posing for pictures. — Lexi Thompson

Beat your opponent where he is strongest, and you demoralize him. — Vince Lombardi

It had been in a Paris house, with many people around, and my dear friend Jules Darboux, wishing to do me a refined aesthetic favor, had touched my sleeve and said, "I want you to meet-" and led me to Nina, who sat in the corner of a couch, her body folded Z-wise, with an ashtray at her heel, and she took a long turquoise cigarette holder from her lips and joyfully, slowly exclaimed, "Well, of all people-" and then all evening my heart felt like breaking, as I passed from group to group with a sticky glass in my fist, now and then looking at her from a distance (she did not look ... ), and listening to scraps of conversation, and overheard one man saying to another, "Funny, how they all smell alike, burnt leaf through whatever perfume they use, those angular dark-haired girls," and as it often happens, a trivial remark related to some unknown topic coiled and clung to one's own intimate recollection, a parasite of its sadness. — Vladimir Nabokov

Chemical weapons simply have no place in the 21st century. Progress in this vital area will help generate momentum to meet our goal of eliminating all weapons of mass destruction. — Ban Ki-moon

Over time, the life of a productive artist becomes filled with useful conventions and practical methods, so that a string of finished pieces continues to appear at the surface. And in truly happy moments those artistic gestures move beyond simple procedure, and acquire an inherent aesthetic all their own. They are your artistic hearth and home, the working-places-to-be that link form and feeling. They become - like the dark colors and asymmetrical lilt of the Mazurka - inseparable from the life of their maker. They are canons. They allow confidence and concentration. They allow not knowing. They allow the automatic and unarticulated to remain so. Once you have found the work you are meant to do, the particulars of any single piece don't matter all that much. — David Bayles

Mannerism, especially when it takes the form of recurrent word or phrase, is by no means easy to represent; there is but a hair's breadth between the point at which the reader delightfully recognizes is as a revealing habit of speech, and the point at which its iteration begin to weary him. — Mary Lascelles

I'm here with Eggie."
All eyes focused on Ric and he suddenly felt like he'd just been handed a speedy death sentence.
"Not for that!" Miss Darla gasped, then added with a firm nod. "Don't you worry one bit, Ulrich.
I made Eggie fill in that shallow grave before we drove up here."
Lock grimaced and Ric swallowed. "Thank you? — Shelly Laurenston

An event is never just what it is in itself and nothing more. It's what goes on around it, at the same time, that makes it - potentially - a tragic situation.

You have to have been exposed to this, at least once, to understand it. — Jacques Yonnet

Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window-panes, snow. — Donna Tartt