1
" Cada época, cada cultura, cada costume e tradição tem seu próprio estilo, tem sua delicadeza e sua severidade, suas belezas e crueldades, aceitam certos sofrimentos como naturais, sofrem pacientemente certas desgraças. O verdadeiro sofrimento, o verdadeiro inferno da vida humana reside ali onde se chocam duas culturas ou duas religiões. Um homem da antiguidade, que tivesse de viver na Idade Média, haveria de sentir-se tão afogado quanto um selvagem se sentiria em nossa civilização. Há momentos em que toda uma geração cai entre dois estilos de vida, e toda evidência, toda moral, toda salvação e inocência ficam perdidos para ela. Naturalmente isso não nos atinge da mesma maneira. "
5
" She was a mimicry of a facade fashioned from the half-truths of her life. She was a beautiful abomination, patched together from the most pristine and terrible parts she could find. She was a black crystal of many cuts and facets whose dark glow suffocated and entranced those it washed over. There was a pointlessness in her eyes and apathy in her stature, and further in, past the symphonies of nightmarish screams was a blinding light. All the capability she could ever ask for kept in a place she would never reach. She chose the ice rather than the fire, shivering and hard with heat sparse, for while a flicker can exist in freeze's cold, it's heat will not radiate, no matter how bold. She took my face in hands that would make ice seem warm and whispered a blizzard into my ear, a cascading song of fear after fear. The lies she spilled, mixed with regrets and appeal, were cloaked in the inferno of her rage, the anger, the only thing that really made her real. This was her one semblance of life, a bottomless and endless void of proportions vast with a calamity of fusion and fission streaking through, a mindless hue, an emotion with a face, a darling of her race. The cracks spew darkness from within her ever so pale skin. They congregated on her curves and flesh in black and churning rivers and streams. They flooded every dip with blackness. They filled every hollow with unstable curiosity, this is her release, this is when she is free. The faces of deceit always laugh, they never wallow for their lies are a pleasure tool, her insides are contorted in laughter the same way, just as slick, just as cruel. A crude combination of fascination, of animation, of the darkest demons of them all. She was poetry written in pen, scratched and scribbled again and again. Ink splattered across the page, and within those scrawled words, those small, sharp incisions, an image can be seen, and you're left to wonder what, in the end, this all could mean... "
7
" Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs. "
― George Orwell
8
" Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light. Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who wilfully live in sadness - sullen in the sweet air, he says. Your 'honour' is all shame and timidity and compliance. Pure of stain! But the artist is the secret criminal in our midst. He is the agent of progress against authority. you are right to be a scholar. A scholar is all scruple, an artist is none. The artist must lie, cheat, deceive, be untrue to nature and contemptuous of history. I made my life into my art and it was an unqualified success. The blaze of my immolation threw its light into every corner of the land where uncounted young men sat each in his own darkness. What would I have done in Megara!? - think what I would have missed! I awoke the imagination of the century. I banged Ruskin's and Pater's heads together, and from the moral severity of one and the aesthetic soul of the other I made art a philosophy that can look the twentieth century in the eye. I had genius, brilliancy, daring, I took charge of my own myth. I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey. I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters. I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new - the New Drama, the New Novel, New Journalism, New Hedonism, New Paganism, even the New Woman. Where were you when all this was happening? "
― , The Invention of Love
14
" Quinn seemed to have become one of a jaded philosophical society, a group of arcane deviates. Their raison d'etre was a kind of mystical masochism, forcing initiates toward feats of occult daredevilry - " glimpsing the inferno with eyes of ice" , to take from the notebook a phrase that was repeated often and seemed a sort of chant of power. As I suspected, hallucinogenic drugs were used by the sect, and there was no doubt that they believed themselves communing with strange metaphysical venues. Their chief aim, in true mystical fashion, was to transcend common reality in the search for higher states of being, but their stratagem was highly unorthodox, a strange detour along the usual path toward positive illumination. Instead, they maintained a kind of blasphemous fatalism, a doomed determinism which brought them face to face with realms of obscure horror. Perhaps it was this very obscurity that allowed them the excitement of their central purpose, which seemed to be a precarious flirting with personal apocalypse, the striving for horrific dominion over horror itself.(" The Dreaming In Nortown" ) "
15
" Whose truth do you want to know, Dr. Amin Jaafari? The truth of a Bedouin who thinks he’s free and clear because he’s got an Israeli passport? The truth of a serviceable Arab per excellence who’s honored wherever he goes, who gets invited to fancy parties by people who want to show how tolerant and considerate they are? The truth of someone who thinks he can change sides like changing a shirt, with no trace left behind? Is that the truth you’re looking for, or is it the one you’re running away from? What planet do you live on, sir? … Our cities are being buried by machines on caterpillar tracks, our patron saints don’t know which way to turn, and you, simply because you’re nice and warm in your golden cage, refuse to see the inferno consuming us. "
― Yasmina Khadra , The Attack
17
" In order to mount to heaven, you used the Inferno to give you momentum. " The further down you gain your momentum," you often used to tell me, " the higher you shall be able to reach. The militant Christian's greatest worth is not his virtue, but his struggle to transform into virtue the impudence, dishonor, unfaithfulness, and malice within him. One day Lucifer will be the most glorious archangel standing next to God; not Michael, Gabriel, or Raphael—but Lucifer, after he has finally transubstantiated his terrible darkness into light. "