It is these black clothes," said Strange. "I am like a leftover piece of funeral, condemned to walk about the Town, frightening people into thinking of their own mortality.
Interpretation
The speaker feels their dark clothing symbolizes death, causing others to confront their own mortality.
In this quote, the character reflects on how their attire serves as a reminder of death and mortality, making others uncomfortable. This suggests a deeper commentary on how our appearances and choices can influence how we are perceived by others, and how reminders of mortality can provoke fear and reflection about the fragility of life.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about societal fears surrounding death.
But when the fairy sang the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairyβs song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.
She doesn't do the things heroines are supposed to. Which is rather Jane Austen's point - Fanny is her subversive heroine. She is gentle and self-doubting and utterly feminine; and given the right circumstances, she would defy an army.
Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see.
I could always imagine more interesting places to be than where I was. And more interesting people than me being there. Eventually, this led to making up stories and writing things down.
All books are doors; and some of them are wardrobes.
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?
Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind.
When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.
When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes-and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.
What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.