#sinister

While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister. ↗

— Jung Chang

#economic #famine #i #mismanagement #more

There is something sinister, something quite biographical about what I do - but that part is for me. It's my personal business. I think there is a lot of romance, melancholy. There's a sadness to it, but there's romance in sadness. I suppose I am a very melancholy person. ↗

— Alexander McQueen

#am #biographical #business #i #i am

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. ↗

— Agnes de Mille

#dancers #give #modern #our #portent

When she opened her eyes they were confronted by a musical box against the opposite wall - one of those early Bavarian toys where mechanical figures perform to the tune. 'How odd,' she thought. The little stage showed a group of fiddlers, two couples in costumes like those of the ball she had just quitted, and in a doorway at the side, a gypsy or beggar man. Very faintly the distant waltz came to her ears, but no footsteps ringing in the abandoned halls. With her hand pressed to her unsteady heart, acting under a sudden compulsion, she pushed down the lever. Delicate plucked music started up; the fiddlers sawed with their clumsy arms in time to an ethereal waltz. The couples moved jerkily out and each raised an arm to clasp its partner. To various clicks and rumbles from under the floor they began to revolve with each other and to orbit round the room. Their movements were sinister because of being both reluctant and predestined. Here they were and this is was what they must do. ("Many Coloured Glass") ↗

— L.M. Boston

#mannequin #sinister #toy #music

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. ↗

— Orson Welles

#sinister #humor

The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (“The Medusa”) ↗

— Thomas Ligotti

#horror #insight #sinister #terror #insight

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#sanity

I moved further and further away from mass entertainment. The sexual element became increasingly sinister and bizarre. Don't blame me! The bastards drove me to it! They all backed off after that! ↗

— Robert Crumb

#away #backed #bastards #became #bizarre

The most sinister aspect of Jack is his detachment, his ability to distance himself from his feelings. ↗

— Victor Garber

#aspect #detachment #distance #feelings #himself

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance. ↗

— David Herbert Lawrence

#blind #craving #created #creating #driving