Book//mark – Olalla | Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885
William Notman, Robert Louis Stevenson / Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla, 1889 Lviv
“She shone on the pale background of the world with the brilliance of flowers.”
“It seemed to breathe a wonderful contentment with what is, such as we love to fancy in the attitude of trees, or the quiescence of a pool.”
“In her eyes that hung upon mine, I could read depth beyond depth of passion and sadness, lights of poetry and hope, blackness of despair, and thoughts that were above the earth. It was a lovely body, but the inmate, the soul was more than worthy of that lodging.”
“What is mine, then, and what am I? If not a curve in this poor body of mine (which you love, and for the sake of which you dotingly dream that you love me) not a gesture that I can frame, not a tone of my voice, not any look from my eyes, no, not even now when I speak to him I love, but has belonged to others? Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with my eyes; other men have heard the pleading of the same voice that now sounds in your ears.”
“She seemed the link that bound me in with dead things on the one hand, and with our pure and pitying God on the other: a thing brutal and divine, and akin at once to the innocence and to the unbridled forces of the earth.”
“I said, ‘the soul and the body are one, and mostly so in love. What the body chooses, the soul loves; where the body clings, the soul cleaves.”
“As one who loved you indeed, but who hated herself so deeply that her love was hateful to her.”
“Man has risen; if he has sprung from the brutes, he can descend again to the same level.”
“Forgive me, if I seem to teach, who am as ignorant as the trees of the mountain, but those who learn much do but skim the face of knowledge; they seize the laws, they conceive the dignity of the design – the horror of the living fact fades from their memory. It is we who sit at home with evil who remember, I think, and are warned and pity.”
“We are all such as He was – the inheritors of sin; we must all bear and expiate a past which was not ours; there is in all of us – ay, even in me – a sparkle of the divine. Like Him, we must endure for a little while, until morning returns bringing peace.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla, A Gothic vampire story, 1885
Also:
To My Mother | A poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885
The Swing | A poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885
Rain | A poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1913
The Wind | A poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1913
Bed in Summer | Robert Louis Stevenson, 1913
