Phantasms Quotes & Sayings

I was a cute baby. My mom said when I was born they threw away the mold. Some of it grew back. — Emo Philips

I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons - the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown. — H.P. Lovecraft

There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes. And the more nervous they are-the quicker to take fright-the more violent they pray that every storm will be ... Painters who have had this mentality, after repeated wounds and intimidations at the hands of the apparitions called human beings, have often come to believe in phantasms-they plainly saw monsters in broad daylight, in the midst of nature. And they did not fob people off with clowning; they did their best to depict these monsters just as they had appeared. Takeichi was right: they had dared to paint pictures of devils. — Osamu Dazai

Psychosynthesis is a method of psychological development and self realization for those who refuse to remain the slave of their own inner phantasms or of external influences, who refuse to submit passively to the play of psychological forces which is going on within them, and who are determined to become the master of their own lives. — Roberto Assagioli

Thus she is almost always a failure as a lawyer, for the law requires only an armament of hollow phrases and stereotyped formulae, and a mental habit which puts these phantasms above sense, truth and justice; and she is almost always a failure in business, for business, in the main, is so foul a compound of trivialities and rogueries that her sense of intellectual integrity revolts against it. — H.L. Mencken

It may be, after all," said the Student Anselmus to himself, "that the superfine stomachic liqueur, which I took somewhat freely in Monsieur Conradi's, might really be the cause of all these shocking phantasms, which tortured me so at Archivarius Lindhorst's door. — E.T.A. Hoffmann

In the entr'acte Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the merits and defects of music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying to take music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and as an instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of the poet on the pedestal. "These phantoms were so far from being phantoms that they were positively clinging on the ladder," said Levin. [ ... ] Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its highest manifestations only by conjunction with all kinds of art. — Leo Tolstoy

Nothing could be more comfortable than writing about the ballet from books. A ballet he had never seen was an art in another world. It was an unrivaled armchair reverie, a lyric from some paradise. He called his work research, but it was actually free, uncontrolled fantasy. He preferred not to savor the ballet in the flesh; rather he savored the phantasms of his own dancing imagination, called up by Western books and pictures. It was like being in love with someone he had never seen. — Yasunari Kawabata

I've given up trying to understand what people think about me. It seems like a lot of people don't like the music we make and don't know me, or something. — Conor Oberst

I don't wear jeans. — Christine Ebersole

Phantasms of the Living, by Gurney and Podmore. — Dion Fortune

A third volume of Memoirs is really a bold undertaking ... I cannot, like a certain female writer, say, I hope if I have done nothing to please, I have done nothing to offend; for truly I mean to give both pleasure and offense ... — Laetitia Pilkington

Likewise, everyone at the Circle there had been chosen, and thus the gene pool was extraordinary, the brainpower phenomenal. It was a place where everyone endeavored, constantly and passionately, to improve themselves, each other, share their knowledge, disseminate it to the world. — Dave Eggers

Do you own anything not pink? (Talon)
I have a purple razor if you'd rather. (Sunshine)
Please. (Talon)
(She pulled out a darker pink one.)
That's not purple. It's pink too. (Talon)
Well, that's all I have unless you want my X-Acto blade. (Sunshine) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I confess that Magic teacheth many superfluous things, and curious prodigies for ostentation; leave them as empty things, yet be not ignorant of their causes. But those things which are for the profit of men
for the turning away of evil events, for the destroying of sorceries, for the curing of diseases, for the exterminating of phantasms, for the preserving of life, honor, or fortune
may be done without offense to God or injury to religion, because they are, as profitable, so necessary. — Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

violent storms. and beautiful smiles. both have electricity. both are equally destructive in nature. — Sanober Khan

An old cardboard box: you think it but you don't say it.
Leftovers, that are swept up and glued together.
I am your alipte, I say, I am your personal trainer and masseuse. I oil you.
But there's no ointment against the bad thoughts and phantasms. — Helene Cixous

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that. — A.S. Byatt

All night the angelic made me gasp for breadth and dream of drowning in sand or earth or mud. I got up, my chest still racked, but glad to be finished with the phantasms which magnify a reality difficult enough in itself. Coffee so bitter it was undrinkable. A big roar. Two big roars. No relief. The mornings only consolation was of a faecal nature. Unexpectedly and impeccably i produced a magnificent turd, so long it had to curve at the ends to fit into the bowl. I contemplated fondly the fine chubby little babe of living clay i'd just brought forth, and my zest for life returned. — Michel Tournier

Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms. — Italo Calvino

The Lurking Fear:
Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined condors of purple fulgurous sky ... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion ... insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation ... Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of clearing skies. — H.P. Lovecraft

You paying good money?"

"For what?"

"Information, asshole. You was the one said it."

"Depends on the information. But please, I had asshole legally dropped from my name.

"That was a mistake. — Joe R. Lansdale

What are you thinking about?"
"Whether they'll write my life story as a tragedy or an epic fantasy. — Maggie Stiefvater

Shreiking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguinated condors of purple fulgurous sky ... formless phantasms and kalaidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion ... insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation ... — H.P. Lovecraft

It was easy to laugh at such conceits in full daylight. But night had a way of lending weight to phantasms. — Scott Lynch

In geology we cannot dispense with conjectures: [but] because we are condemned to dream let us ensure that our dreams are like those of sane men-e.g. that they have their foundations in truth-and are not like the dreams of the sick, formed by strange combinations of phantasms, contrary to nature and therefore incredible. — Scipione Breislak

servomechanism in which a moral vacuum had been so successfully sucked clean of every molecule of real qualm or scruple that his own descriptions of the unutterable crimes he perpetrated daily seem often to float outside and apart from evil, phantasms of cretinous innocence. Yet — William Styron

It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine. — H.P. Lovecraft

Most of the difficult things in golf are mental, not physical. Are subjective, not objective. Are the created phantasms of the mind, not the veritable realities of the course. — Arnold Haultain

I admire tremendously those people who work consistently at the same jobs. — Hayley Mills

Bog-lights, vapors of mysticism, psychic Gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations - this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your book shelves.
Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget. — Jack London

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy. — H.P. Lovecraft

A fresh dream-fresh happiness! A fresh rush of delicate, voluptuous poison! What is real life to him ! To his corrupted eyes we live, you and I, Nastenka, so torpidly, slowly, insipidly; in his eyes we are all so dissatisfied with our fate, so exhausted by our life! And, truly, see how at first sight everything is cold, morose, as though ill-humoured among us ... Poor things! thinks our dreamer. And it is no wonder that he thinks it! Look at these magic phantasms, which so enchantingly, so whimsically, so carelessly and freely group before him in such a magic, animated picture, in which the most prominent figure in the foreground is of course himself, our dreamer, in his precious person. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As his mouth flooded with that horrible sweet purple taste, he could actually see those grapes dull, dusty, obese and nasty, crawling up a dirty stucco wall in a thick, syrupy sunlight that was silent except for the stupid buzz of many flies — Stephen King

Man understood in the end what man is. He renounces the analysis of God, penetrating the impalpable, in which he has not seen, to give laws to the phantasms of his brain. Man understands that his inheritance is the greater world whose dominion is within his grasp. Tired of useless and presumptuous labor he bows his head and looks about him, and now he sees how our poets are born. Little by little nature's muses open their treasures and start to smile upon us, and lead us far from such labors. — Jose Rizal

Now is the chance for me to let go and release some new Nephilim tracks which have been constrained to the studio for some time. Trying to concentrate the work and thoughts down to a simple single objective is always a difficult practice but that's the nature of the beast ... easy to find the beginning but always hard to reach the end — Carl McCoy