The Accursed

I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!

... while madness in individuals is relatively rare, it is virtually a prerequisite for a certain sort of political leader.

The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn't want to put restraints on "robber barons"-he might become one one day!

For isn't the artist by nature a revolutionary?

... the hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world.

And we can read - there is always the prospect of escape, through books." "Books are not a means of 'escape', Meta! Books are a means of knowledge, and of learning how to cope with the future.

No way of life so entrenched will ever 'wither away' - it must be helped, with dynamite, if need be.

I could wish that I had recourse to the Prince of Darkness & his quick ways of revenge;

In so sick a society as ours how is it possible that any citizen is healthy, at all?

So we invent reasons for the unreasonable. We are rationalists of the irrational. It

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

The Bog Kingdom. Bidding him enter! Ah, enter! There, all wishes are fulfilled. The more forbidden, the more delicious.

It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power.

While Annabel possessed the sylphid grace of a fairy-tale princess, unstudied and seemingly spontaneous, yet with a dreamy air, Willy presented a dramatic contrast: brash, brusque, heavy-jawed, with eyes that engaged too directly, and too often ironically. Willy’s considerable charm was at first obscured, to the superficial eye, by a certain stolidity in her figure, as in her character.

Josiah feel that, for a moment, he’d been cast back to his adolescent self on this very campus: essentially, a claustrophobic little world of privilege and anxiety in which one was made to care too much about too little.

A man may accommodate himself to a disagreeable situation in a few months. The intolerable may take a little longer.

The master bedchamber at the top of a flight of badly worn and mossy stone steps, overlaid with grime, and the hard-dried excrement and remains of vermin—overlooking, from its single (barred) window, a marshy graveyard, the aged markers tilted and filthy from neglect, spiky grasses growing all around, and pools of brackish water interspersed among the graves.

Willy was more forceful, as Annabel seemed to glide;

Maidstone exerts a curious spell upon the observer: suggesting, in its somewhat blunt, foursquare architecture, and its towering chimneys and exceptionally tall, narrow, and “brooding” windows, frequently kept shuttered, an unusual blend of the funereal and the sublime. As

A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons—Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy. Josiah

For his part, the stranger was drifting in Annabel’s direction, yet not very deliberately. As if, in some way, he were being drawn to her, by some (unconscious) motion or motive of Annabel herself. Why

VERY ODD, HOWEVER, Annabel was beginning to feel, how the stranger continued to hold the hand-sickle, at his side; now he’d turned to her, seeing her, yet without an air of surprise, as if he’d known she was there, observing him; he smiled, in a rapt sort of silence, as no gentleman would ever do, in fact; as if he and Annabel Slade had met by chance in a public place, or in some dimension in which the sexes might “meet” impersonally, like animals, with no names, no families—no identities. In that instant, Annabel felt both chilled and flushed with warmth; and somewhat faint; and had to resist the impulse to hide her (burning) face in the little bouquet of flowers she had picked, that the bold stranger would not stare so directly upon her with his penetrating gaze. A

of all psychic conditions, anxiety verging upon paranoia/hysteria is perhaps the most contagious, even among men.

that I—I have not ‘heard’ . . . What is it?

went out for sports as others did, in an affable herd.

For The Accursed is intended as a work of inquiring moral complexity, and not a “sensationalist” rehashing of an old, dread scandal far better left to molder in the grave!

grip of Paradox. A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons—Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy.