If we go on in this way, we shall have a new art of poetry, of which one of the first rules will be: To remember to forget that there are any such things as sunshine and music in the world.

Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey [Amazon, Bookshop, Internet Archive]

Hermetic quote Peacock Nightmare Abbey new art of poetry first rules forget sunshine and music

Consider also:

  1. “Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.”
  2. “The smell pierced her. It coiled and drifted and wove through her, conjuring the last drip of whiskey in her father’s crystal decanter, the first strawberries of summer, the last scrap of Christmas pudding smeared over gold-chased bone china and licked off with lazy tongue swipes. It smelled like a sticky wetness on her fingers, coaxed out of a pretty girl in the cloak room at a Mayfair ball, slipped into a pair of silk gloves and placed on a young colonel’s scarlet shoulder during the waltz.”
  3. Xombi
  4. “the moment he decided to give it a look”
  5. “O! hear me not! I die; I am borne away in misery of dumb life That would in words flash forth the holiest heaven That to the immortal God of Gods is given, And, tongue-tied, stammers forth – my wife!”