What is the Hebrew version?

בצער לא רב וביגון לא קודר
כי הזמן את העצב ליד המתים קובר

Beautiful, isn't it?

"'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains."

I concur.

"Why is it that we don't always recognize the moment when love begins but we always know when it ends?"

"Sitting there at that moment I thought of something else Shakespeare said. He said, "Hey... life is pretty stupid; with lots of hubbub to keep you busy, but really not amounting to much." Of course I'm paraphrasing: "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

-Harris Telemaker (Steve Martin)

---------------------------------------------

My two favorites:

"All the darkness of the world cannot put out the light of one small candle." - don't know who this one comes from...found it some time ago in a list of quotes, and it just struck a cord with me.

"Not all who wander are lost!" J.R.R. Tolkien

1. The dead travel fast - Bram Stoker
2. Evil is a point of view - Anne Rice

Ok, not a song!

But does anyone know if its possible to find Gothic Christmas Quotes? I've been searching the net and no joy

On Gothic Christmas Quotes:

"Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail."

- Dickens, A Christmas Carol

And that's a long one, but there are plenty of other one's from that.

Also try (not quite as gothic - per se - but):

"You nauseate me, Mr. Grinch / With a nauseous super-naus / You're a crooked, jerky jockey and you drive a crooked hoss / Mr. Gri-inch! Your soul is an apalling dump-heap, overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of rubbish imaginable, mangled up in tangled up knots!"

"You're a monster, Mr. Grinch / Your heart's an empty hole / Your brain is full of spiders, you have garlic in your soul / Mr. Grinch / I wouldn't touch you with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole"

-Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Or Perhaps,

"Jack! But they said you were dead. You must be... DOUBLE DEAD!"
-Nightmare Before Christmas

(and there's bound to be more, but I have things to do)

NOTE: the above are in the canon of popular culture; however, there are also really obscure Christmas poems and stories that are really... odd... such as The Burning Babe by Robert Southwell (cerca 1595) from which I shall copy an excert.

"'Alas,' quoth he, 'but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts, or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel justice layeth on, and mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men's defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.'"

And finally - before I go off I'll leave you with an excert from Hans Christian Anderson's Den Lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne or The Little Match Seller (1845).

"In the dawn of morning there lay the poor little one, with pale cheeks and smiling mouth, leaning against the wall; she had been frozen to death on the last evening of the year; and the New-year's sun rose and shone upon a little corpse! The child still sat, in the stiffness of death, holding the matches in her hand, one bundle of which was burnt. “She tried to warm herself,” said some. No one imagined what beautiful things she had seen, nor into what glory she had entered with her grandmother, on New-year's day"

^
Fabulous! That is quite a collection

"I could sleep forever, just to live inside my dreams world."

Death is only the beginning:the mummy

The last two stanza's of Keats' 'Eve of St. Agnes':


They glide, like phantoms, into the wide hall;
Like phantoms, to the iron porch, they glide;
Where lay the Porter, in uneasy sprawl,
With a huge empty flagon by his side:
The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,
But his sagacious eye an inmate owns:
By one, and one, the bolts fill easy slide:---
The chains lie silent on the footworn stones,---
The key turns, and the door upon its hinges groans.

And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form
Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,
Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old
Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,
For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.

-- Tue Feb 16, 2010 6:00 pm --

More from Keats' poem:


Beyond a mortal man impassion'd far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose,
Ethereal, flush'd, and like a throbbing star
Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odour with the violet,---
Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows
Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes; St Agnes' moon hath set.

Tis dark: quick pattereth the flaw-blown sleet:
"This is no dream, my bride, my Madeline!"
'Tis dark: the iced gusts still rave and beat:
"No dream, alas! alas! and woe is mine!
Porphyro will leave me here to fade and pine.---
Cruel! what traitor could thee hither bring?
I curse not, for my heart is lost in thine
Though thou forsakest a deceived thing;---
A dove forlorn and lost with sick unpruned wing."

"My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!
Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?
Thy beauty's shield, heart-shap'd and vermeil dyed?
Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest
After so many hours of toil and quest,
A famish'd pilgrim,---saved by miracle.
Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest
Saving of thy sweet self; if thou think'st well
To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel.

"Hark! 'tis an elfin-storm from faery land,
Of haggard seeming, but a boon indeed:
Arise---arise! the morning is at hand;---
The bloated wassailers will never heed:---
Let us away, my love, with happy speed;
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,---
Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead:
Awake! arise! my love, and fearless be,
For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee."

-- Tue Feb 16, 2010 6:04 pm --

Jacobean dramatist John Webster is a great source for the grotesque and arabesque:


A DIRGE

by: John Webster

ALL for the robin-redbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm;
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.


and.....



HARK, NOW EVERYTHING IS STILL

by: John Webster

ARK, now everything is still,
The screech-owl and the whistler shrill,
Call upon our dame aloud,
And bid her quickly don her shroud!
Much you had of land and rent;
Your length in clay's now competent:
A long war disturbed your mind;
Here your perfect peace is signed.
Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror.
Strew your hair with powders sweet,
Don clean linen, bathe your feet,
And (the foul fiend more to check)
A crucifix let bless your neck:
'Tis now full tide 'tween night and day;
End your groan, and come away.


and....


VANITAS VANITATUM

by: John Webster

LL the flowers of the spring
Meet to perfume our burying;
These have but their growing prime,
And man does flourish but his time:
Survey our progress from our birth;
We are set, we grow, we turn to earth.
Courts adieu, and all delights,
All bewitching appetites!
Sweetest breath and clearest eye,
Like perfumes, go out and die;
And consequently this is done
As shadows wait upon the sun.
Vain ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.

-- Tue Feb 16, 2010 6:15 pm --

One of the best and most overlooked of the TRUE Gothic Romantic poets is Tomas Lovell Beddoes.

'Death's Jest Book' is an essential MUST for any gothic bookshelf.


some samples:


To Night:

So thou art come again, old black-winged night,
Like an huge bird, between us and the sun,
Hiding, with out-stretched form, the genial light;
And still, beneath thine icy bosom's dun
And cloudy plumage, hatching fog-breathed blight
And embryo storms, and crabbéd frosts, that shun
Day's warm caress. The owls from ivied loop
Are shrieking homage, as thou cowerest high;
Like sable crow pausing in eager stoop
On the dim world thou gluttest thy clouded eye,
Silently waiting latest time's fell whoop,
When thou shalt quit thine eyrie in the sky,
To pounce upon the world with eager claw,
And tomb time, death, and substance in thy maw.


Another....


Dirge


IF thou wilt ease thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then sleep, dear, sleep;
And not a sorrow
Hang any tear on your eye-lashes;
Lie still and deep,
Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes
The rim o’ the sun to-morrow,
In eastern sky.

But wilt thou cure thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then die, dear, die;
’T is deeper, sweeter,
Than on a rose bank to lie dreaming
With folded eye;
And then alone, amid the beaming
Of love’s stars, thou ’lt meet her
In eastern sky.


and another....


Old Adam, the Carrion Crow

Old Adam, the carrion crow,
The old crow of Cairo;
He sat in the shower, and let it flow
Under his tail and over his crest;
And through every feather
Leak'd the wet weather;
And the bough swung under his nest;
For his beak it was heavy with marrow.
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It's only two devils, that blow,
Through a murderer's bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts' moonshine.

Ho! Eve, my grey carrion wife,
When we have supped on king's marrow,
Where shall we drink and make merry our life?
Our nest it is queen Cleopatra's skull,
'Tis cloven and crack'd,
And batter'd and hack'd,
But with tears of blue eyes it is full:
Let us drink then, my raven of Cairo!
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It's only two devils, that blow
Through a murderer's bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts' moonshine.

These are the tears...
The tears we shed
This is the fear
This is the dread
These are the contents of my head

http://artists.letssingit.com/annie-len ... hy-936tvlt

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."
Friedrich Nietzsche