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Belladonna

Book by Adalyn Grace · 25 quotes · Gothic Romance, Dark Academia, Death

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Belladonna Quotes

“Andreas Ban would like to put several swifts on his chest to rest, to breathe with him like sleeping children. Little black birds like cheerful death. Painless. Little black birds with big eyes and a small beak, which peck noiselessly at his insides, see what is there and are silent. Andreas Ban stretches his arms toward the sky, imagining that he is flying, imagining himself in a flock of swifts and lets out a stifled cry. Small birds, they die when they are alone. He, Andreas Ban, is alone.”

“A human life is a beautiful thing," he said. "You humans.... you feel. You feel so deeply that it consumes you. There were humans I kept a watch over, though I would blink and they'd be fifty, sixty years older—and the time would come for me to meet them. For the longest time, I pitied them for their short lives. And I admit, Signa, that I have grown more callous with my age. But I have also grown to admire humans. They've such a short time to experience their lives, and so they must feel deeply. They must experience in one life-time things it's taken me an eternity to experience. When I see men like Elijah, rather than feel guilt for what I've done, I remember that he feels sorrow because he loved so deeply. And were I not real, Little Bird, were I not Death, he would never have experienced that love. So which is better? To live forever, or to live and love?”

“...the intellectual is a person who nurtures, preserves and propagates independent judgment, a person loyal exclusively to truth, a courageous and wrathful individual for whom no force of this world is too great or too frightening not to be subjected to scrutiny and called to account. ... A true intellectual, a genuine one, is always an outsider, …he is a person who lives in self-imposed exile on the margins of society.”

“A Lady's Guide to Beauty and Etiquette was starting to feel less like her saving grace and more like a nuisance. A grim reminder that because she couldn't master the rules - because they exhausted her so - she would never be good enough, or perfect enough, or deserving enough. It was silly, she thought, for a book to make her feel such loathing for herself. She was better than that, more than that.”

“In other words, melancholy would be a pathological form of mourning, a sick flight from reality, a flight from the outside world into a refuge, into the inner world of the psyche. What if reality is sick, what then? What if the inner world is destroyed, in ruins and robbed, where to then? So, in grief, the world becomes poor and empty, while in melancholy the ego is like some kind of abandoned archaeological discovery that has been dug up. Yes, the melancholic is a radical atheist who in his hollow discourse worships a dead god.”

“The philosophy of the province is a philosophy of a closed circle that does not allow an apostasy, without which there is no creativity. The philosophy of the province is a normative and normalizing, suprapersonal and impersonal philosophy, it shuts out all aspects of life, education, sport, nutrition, nature, love, work, language, religion and death (which is far from being the death of an individual) replacing life with rigid forms of the normative which apply to all.”