"The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society; rather the offspring of a nation's effort, than the inspired flash of a man of genius; the deposit left by a whole people; the heaps accumulated by centuries; the residue of successive evaporations of human society, in a word, a species of formation. Each wave of time contributes its alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the monument, each individual brings his stone."
- Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame ... See MoreSee Less

"Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky."
- Bram Stoker, Dracula ... See MoreSee Less

"What did the victims matter that the machine crushed in its course! Was it not bound for the future anyway, heedless of spilt blood? With no driver, through the dark night, like a blind, deaf beast let loose among the dead, it rolled on and on, loaded with this cannon-fodder, these soldiers, already stupid with fatigue, and drunk, who were singing."
- Emile Zola, La Bête Humaine ... See MoreSee Less

"Morning drew on apace. The air became more sharp and piercing, as its first dull hue: the death of night, rather than the birth of day: glimmered faintly in the sky. The objects which had looked dim and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually resolved into their familiar shapes."
- Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist ... See MoreSee Less

"I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellect of hackney-coachmen."
- Thomas De Quincey ... See MoreSee Less

"Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet."
- Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen ... See MoreSee Less

"So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in."
- Rainer Maria Rilke ... See MoreSee Less

"I felt that I was a justified person... but I was a solitary one. I had no person to whom I could reveal the strange experiences of my spirit, or the mysterious shadows that followed me through the damp, airless lanes of the town."
- James Hogg ... See MoreSee Less

"In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round."
- Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit ... See MoreSee Less

“He was a man of the night, a man of the shadows, and he knew that the shadows were the only place where a man could be truly himself.”
- Bram Stoker, Dracula ... See MoreSee Less

"The heights of popularity and the depths of solitude are often found in the same city; for where the crowd is thickest, the individual may find himself most alone, and where the stone is grandest, the soul may feel its own smallness."
- David Hume ... See MoreSee Less

"Maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."
- Edward Hopper ... See MoreSee Less

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."
- Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism ... See MoreSee Less

"An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom."
- Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush ... See MoreSee Less

"The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. K. stood a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him."
- Franz Kafka, The Castle ... See MoreSee Less