Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy...

For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

girl morning sweet

But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

wall dark dream

You are afraid to die?' Yes, everyone is.' But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars when they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structures.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

butterfly girl summer

Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die--die, sweetly die--into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

law heart thinking

You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

selfish hate love

Knowledge is power-and power of one sort or another is the secret lust of human souls; and here is, beside the sense of exploration, the undefinable interest of a story, and above all, something forbidden, to stimulate the contumacious appetite.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

soul lust secret

Nevertheless, life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

mysterious life-and-death littles

There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains. Lifted high above the level of human sounds and habitations, among the wild expanses and colossal features of Nature, we are thrilled in our loneliness with a strange fear and elation – an ascent above the reach of life's expectations or companionship, and the tremblings of a wild and undefined misgivings.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

solitude loneliness expectations

What a fool I was! and yet, in the sight of angels, are we any wiser as we grow older? It seems to me, only, that our illusions change as we go on; but, still, we are madmen all the same.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

angel sight goes-on

There is no dealing with great sorrow as if it were under the control of our wills. It is a terrible phenomenon, whose laws we must study, and to whose conditions we must submit, if we would mitigate it.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

study sorrow law

Perhaps, she says (Madame de la Rougierre), Other souls than human are sometimes born into the world & clothed in human flesh.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

soul flesh world

No one likes a straight road but the man who pays for it, or who, when he travels, is brute enough to wish to get to his journey's end.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

journey men travel

I did not know till now how irresolute a character was mine.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

mines knows character

There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

form age heart

Old persons are sometimes as unwilling to die as tired-out children are to say good night and go to bed.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

tired good-night children

I can not help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

trust-me spirit helping

I remember everything about it—with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

dense remembers-everything effort

But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

lovers together may

Women are so enigmatical - some in everything - all in matters of the heart. Don't they sometimes actually admire what is repulsive?

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

matter heart sometimes

but curiosity is a restless and scrupulous passion, and no one girl can endure, with patience, that hers should be baffled by another.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

passion girl curiosity

How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long - the care of cares - the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven - and straight you find a new stratum there.