Macbeth Key Gothic Quotes by Scene

“the danger of ambition well described” Samuel Johnson, 18th century

Lines in bold were ones that I prioritised learning!

Act 1, Scene 1:

• When shall we three meet again? / In thunder, lightning, or in rain? / When the hurly-burly’s done; /When the battle’s lost and won. / That will be ere the set of sun.
• Fair is foul and foul is fair / Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Act 1, Scene 2:

• For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name) / Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel, / Which smoked with bloody execution,

Act 1, Scene 3:

• So withered, and so wild in their attire, / That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth
• By each at once her choppy finger laying / Upon her skinny lips. You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so.

• All hail, Macbeth! That shalt be King hereafter!
• Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. / Not so happy, yet much happier.
• The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, / And these are of them
• Come what may, / Time and the hour runs through the roughest day

Act 1, Scene 5

• Hie thee hither, / That I may pour my spirits in thine ear / And chastise with the valour of my tongue / All that impedes thee from the golden round / Whhich Fate and metaphysical aid doth seem / To have thee crowned withal.

• Come you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full / Of direst cruelty: make thick my blood, / Stop up th’access and passage to remorse, / That no compunctious visitings of nature / Shake my fell purpose.
• Come, thick night, / And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell, / That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, / Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark / To cry ‘Hold, hold’!
• Look like th’innocent flower / but be the serpent under‘t

Act 1, Scene 7

• If it were done, when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well / It were done quickly: if th’ assassination / Could trammel up the consequence and catch, / With his surcease, success; that but this blow / Might be the be-all and the end-all: here, / But here, upon this bank and shoal of time.
• Upon the sightless couriers of the air, / Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, / That tears shall drown the wind.I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself, / And falls on th’other -
• I have given suck, and know / How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me: / I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you / Have done to this.

Act 2, Scene 1

• Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee: / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. / Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling, as to sight? Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
• I see thou still, / And, on thy blade and dudgeon, gouts of blood, / Which was not so before.
• I go, and it is done: the bell invites me. / Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to Heaven, or to Hell.

Act 2, Scene 2

• Still it cried ‘Sleep no more!’ to all the house; / ‘Glamis hath murthered sleep, and therefore Cawdor / Shall sleep no more: Macbeth shall sleep no more!
• Whence is that Knocking? / How is’t with me, when every noise appals me? / What hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes! / Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?
• My hands are of your colour; But I shame / To wear a heart so white.

Act 2, Scene 3

• Knock, knock! Never at quiet! What are you? But this placvce is too cold for Hell. I’ll Devil-porter it no further.
• O horror, horror, horror! Tongue, nor heart, / Cannot conceive nor name thee!...Confusion now hath made his masterpiece: / Most sacrilegious murther hath broke ope / The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence / The life o’th’building.
• From this instant, / There’s nothing serious in mortality: / All is but toys; renown and grace is dead; / The wine of life is drawn.
• Here lay Duncan, / His silver skin laced with his golden blood, / And his gashed stabs looked like a breach in nature / For ruin’s wasteful entrance; there, the murtherers, / Steeped in the colours of their trade, their daggers / Unmannerly breeched with gore: who could refrain, / That had a great to love, and in that heart / Courage to make’s love known?

Act 3, Scene 1

• Thou hast it now, King Cawdor, Glamis, all / As the Weyward Women promised, and I fear / Thou play’dst most foully for’t...prophet-like, / They hailed him father to a line of kings. / Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown, / And put a barren sceptre in my gripe.
• Banquo, thy soul’s flight, / If it find Heaven, must find it out tonight.

Act 3, Scene 2

• Nought’s had, all’s spent / Where our desire is got without content: / ‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy, / Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
• We have scorched the snake, not killed it; / She’ll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice / Remains in danger for her former tooth.
• Come, seeling night, / Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, / And with thy bloody and invisible hand / Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond / Which keeps me pale! Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wings to th’rooky wood

Act 3, Scene 4:

• I had else been perfect; / Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, / As broad and general as the casing air; / But now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in / To saucy doubts and fears.
• ‘What is’t that moves your Highness?’ // Which of you have done this? / ‘What my good lord?’ / [to ghost] Thou canst not say I did it; never shake thy gory locks at me.
• ‘Are you a man?’ / Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that / Which might appal the Devil.
• Approach thou like a rugged Russian bear, / The armed rhinoceros, or th’Hyrcan tiger, / Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves / Shall never tremble. Or be alive again, / And dare me to the desert with thy sword.
• It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood. / Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak; / Augures and understood relations have / By maggot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth / The secret’st man of blood. What is the night?
• I will tomorrow / (And betimes I will) to the Weyward Sisters. / More shall they speak: for now I am bent to know, / By the worst means, the worst.

Act 3, Scene 5

• How did you dare / To trade and traffic with Macbeth / In riddles and affairs of death.

Act 3, Scene 6

• How it did grieve Macbeth! Did he not straight, / In pious rage, the two delinquents tear / ...Was not that nobly done? Ay, and wisely too.

Act 4, Scene 1

• Like a Hell-broth, boil and bubble. / Double, double, toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
• ‘Be bloody, bold, and resolute: laugh to scorn / The power of man; for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth’ Then live Macduff: what need I fear of thee? / But yet I’ll make assurance double sure, / And take a bond of fate: thou shalt not live, / That I may tell pale-hearted fear it lies, / And sleep in spite of thunder.
• Thou art too like the spirit of Banquo: down! / Thy crown does sear mine eyeballs. And thy hair, / Thou other gold-bound brow, is like the first….filthy hags! Why do you show me this?
• Time, thou anticipat’st my dread exploits: / The flighty purpose never is o’ertook / Unless the deed go with it. From this moment, / The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand. And even now, / To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought and done.

Act 4, Scene 2

• What, you egg? Young fry of treachery! / ‘He has killed me, mother: Run away, I pray you.’ / Murther!

Act 4, Scene 3

• Each new morn / New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows / Strike Heaven on the face.
• All the particulars of vice so grafted / That, when they shall be opened, black Macbeth / Will seem as pure as snow.
• Not in the legions / Of horrid Hell can come a devil more damned / In evils to top Macbeth.
• ‘Fit to govern’? / No, not to live! O nation miserable, / WIth an untitled tyrant, bloody-sceptred, / When shalt thou see thy wholesome days again.
• Let not your ears despise my tongue for ever, / Which shall possess them with the heaviest sound / That ever yet they heard...Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes / Savagely slaughtered.
• Receive what cheer you may; / The night is long that never finds the day.

Act 5, Scene 1:

• Out, damned spot: out, I say! One: two: why, then ‘tis time to do’t: Hell is murky. Fie, my lord, fie! A soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to accompt? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

• What, will these hands ne’er be clean?
• There’s knocking at the gate; come, come, come, come, give me your hand: what’s done, cannot be undone. To bed, to bed, to bed.
• Foul whisp’rings are abroad: unnatural deeds / do breed unnatural troubles.

Act 5, Scene 2:

• Meet we the med’cine of the sickly weal, / And with him pour we, in our country’s purge, / Each drop of us.

Act 5, Scene 3:

• The mind I sway by, and the heart I bear, / Shall never sag with doubt, nor shake with fear.
• Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, / Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, / Raze out the written troubles of the brain, / And with some sweet oblivious antidote / Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff / Which weighs upon the heart?

Act 5, Scene 5:

• Hang out our banners on the outward walls. / The cry is still ‘They come’. Our castle’s strength / WIll laugh a siege to scorn.
• I have almost forgot the taste of fears. / The time has been, my senses would have cooled / To hear a night-shriek.
• Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle? / Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more.

Act 5, Scene 6:

• Make all our trumpets speak: give them all breath, / Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death!

Act 5, Scene 7

• They have tied my to a stake: I cannot fly, / But bear-like I must fight the course.
• Thou wast born of woman; / But swords I smile at, weapons laugh to scorn, / Brandished by a man that’s of a woman born.

Act 5, Scene 8

• But get thee back: my soul is too much charged / With blood of thine already.
• I have no words: / My voice is in my sword, thou bloodier villain.
• Despair thy charm, / And let the angel whom thou still hast served / Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped.
• Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane, / And thou opposed, being of no woman born, / Yet I will try the last. Before my body / I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff, / And damned be him that first cries ‘Hold, enough’!

Act 5, Scene 9

• Hail, King, for so thou art. Behold, where stands / Th’usurper’s cursed head: the time is free. / I see thee compassed with thy kingdom’s pearl, / That speaks my salutation in their minds; / Whose voices I desire aloud with mine: / Hail, King of Scotland!
• Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like Queen, / (Who, as ‘tis thought, by self and violent hands / Took off her life): this, and what needful else / That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace / We will perform in measure, time and place.

The Erl King Key Gothic Quotes

“perfect transparency must be impenetrable”

“vertical bars” “sulphur-yellow” “grey clouds”

“russet slime” “dead bracken” “lancinating cold”

“stark elders have an anorexic look”

“haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being”

“The woods enclose.” “the wood swallows you up”

“you must stay there until it lets you out again” “subtle labyrinth”

“she will be trapped in her own illusion” “here everything is exactly as it seems”

“the woods enclose then enclose again, like a system of Chinese boxes”

“it is easy to lose yourself in these woods”

“as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made into sound”

“I felt I was in a house of nets”

(isolated line) “Erl-King will do you grievous harm.”

“as desolate as if it came from the throat of the last bird alive”

“wild things, who have all the time in the world”

“reddish hare” “rusty fox” “trunk of a scarlet rowan”

“uncanny whiteness” “gleaming like a goat of snow” “bleated softly”

“his irrevocable hand” “there are some eyes that can eat you”

“he came alive from the desire of the woods”

“the brambles, he says the Devil spits on them at Michaelmas”

“he knows all about the wood and the creatures in it” (repetition of) “he told me”

“he said the owl was a baker’s daughter; then, he smiled at me”

“his kitchen shakes and shivers with birdsong from cage upon cage of singing birds”

“a wall of trapped birds” “How cruel it is, to keep wild birds in cages!”

“white, pointed teeth” “a sweet, acrid smoke, a bright, glancing flame”

“I always go to the Erl-King” “I lie at the mercy of his huge hands”

“He is the tender butcher who showed me that the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says!”

“those silly, fat, trusting woodies with the pretty wedding rings around their necks”

“the cold air that blows over graveyards always goes with him” “I am not afraid of him”

“he could thrust me into the seed-bed of the next generation” “until he whistled me up from my darkness”

“I come, like any other trusting thing that perches on the crook of his wrist”

“dead leaves, some the colour of honey, some the colour of cinders”

“that was the way I walked into the bird-haunted solitude of the Erl-King”

“rattle of the rain on the roof”

“I feel your sharp teeth in the subaqueous depths of your kisses”

“How sweet I roamed, or rather, used to roam”

“he drew me towards him on his magic lasso of inhuman music”

“if I strung that old fiddle with your hair” “better music than the shrill prothalamions of of the larks stacked in pretty cages”

“he strips me to my last nakedness” “dresses me again in an embrace so lucid and encompassing it might be made of water”

“we are like two halves of a seed” “I should like to grow enormously small, so that you could swallow me”

“his touch both consoles and devastates me” “I feel my heart pulse, then wither”

“this innocent” “eat me, drink me”

“his dress of water, this garment that drenches me [...] its capacity for drowning”

“such appalling succulence”

“the light from the fire sucked into the black vortex of his eye”

“eyes as green as apples. Green as dead sea fruit.”

“what big eyes you have”

“I am afraid I will be trapped in it forever”

“I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and consumed by you”

“I have seen the cage you are weaving for me” “terrible fear”

“I loved him with all my heart yet I had no desire to join the whistling congregation”

“his embraces were his enticements, and yet, oh yet! They were the branches of which the trap itself was woven”

“I don’t know what tunes you might play on it, if it was strung again”

“the birds don’t sing, they only cry” “the corrosive pools of his regard”

“I shall” “as he lies half dreaming, half waking”

“with hands as gentle as rain, I will strangle him with them”

“then she will open all the cages” “they will change back into young girls” “each with the crimson imprint of his love-bite on their throats”

“discordant music without a hand touching it”

“the bow will dance over the strings of its own accord”

“they will cry out, “Mother, mother, you have murdered me!”

NOTE: I didn't learn all of these for the exam, neither should this be considered a total, complete list. Just a handy selection of quotes that I found covered most of the main themes of The Erl Kin by Angela Carter!

The Lady of the House of Love Quotes by Key Gothic Themes

The Bloody Chamber - The Lady of the House of Love

DEPICTIONS OF EVIL/GOOD

Ancestors:

“subtle and vindictive inhabitants”

“demented and atrocious ancestors” “blubber lips” “demented eyes”

The Countess:

“queen of the vampires”

“white lace neglige stained a little with blood”

“teeth as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar”

“my darkness” “I thought, perhaps, you might irradiate it”

The Hero:

“youth and strength and blond beauty” “pentacle of his virginity”

“immune to shadow, due to his virginity”

“his heroism, which makes him like the sun” “he cannot feel terror”

(isol line) “This lack of imagination gives heroism to the hero”

“he would like to take her into his arms and protect her”

SUPERNATURAL

“sobbing in a derelict bedroom where a cracked mirror … does not reflect a presence”

“ghostly occupants”

“her voice is curiously disembodied” “like a doll” “ventriloquist’s doll” “great, ingenious piece of clockwork”

“no mouth with which to kiss, no hands with which to caress, only the fangs and talons of a beast of prey”

“fundamental disbelief”

“petals had regained all their former bloom”

PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTORTION

“the blood on the Countess’ cheeks will be mixed with tears”

“brusquely reminded himself that he was no child, now”

“he sharply reprimanded himself for his own childish lack of enthusiasm”

HORROR AND TERROR

“hereditary commandant of the army of shadows” “who make the milk curdle”

“What a grisly picture of a capering skeleton!”

“fatal embrace” “the bridegroom bleeds on my inverted marriage bed”

“monstrous flower” “corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour”

FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE

“their swooning odour, that breathes lasciviously of forbidden pleasures”

“ceaselessly construing a constellation of possibilities”

“he would dazzle her like the sun she is forbidden to look at”

“retaining all about you the golden light of summer’s day of which I know nothing, nothing”

“so fingered, so soiled, so worn” “no longer make the image out on any single one of them”

FRIGHTENING ATMOSPHERE AND IMAGES

“too many shadows” “shadows” x2

“centuries of corpses” “last bud of the poison tree”

“blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness strong enough, almost, to fell him”

“too many roses. too many roses bloomed” “remains”

DRAMATIC TENSION

“now you are at the place of annihilation” x4

“it was too late to turn back”

“does not yet know what there is to be afraid of”

“Suivez-moi, je vous attendais, vous serez ma proie”

“the handsome bicyclist, scarcely believing his luck, will follow her into her bedroom”

“she knows no other consummation than the only one she can give him”

MASCULINE/FEMININE

“perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden”

“beautiful and ghastly lady” “queen of night, queen of terror” “Countess” “horrible reluctance for the role”

“tenebrous belle”

“but now she is a woman, she must have men”

“she would like to caress their lean brown cheeks and stroke their ragged hair”

“the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail”

“bedizened scarecrow” “lovely death’s head”

“shipwrecked bride” “huge dark eyes” “waiflike, lost look”

“extraordinarily fleshy mouth” “vibrant purplish-crimson” “morbid mouth”

“blond, blue-eyed, heavy-muscled”

“the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states” “power in potentia”

ENTRAPMENT

“she likes to hear it announce how it cannot escape”

VAMPIRES/THE BEASTLY

“until she grows hungry, until she grows ravenous”

“her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity”

“symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness”

“sniff the air and howl” “on all fours” “crouching, quivering” “scent of her prey” “huntress” “poor night bird, poor butcher bird”

MURDER/DEATH/DAMNATION

“beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes”

“a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit”

“her inevitable Tarot”

“visible signs of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade”

“constantly constructing hypotheses about a future which is irreversible”

“you will follow her”

“history has already prepared a special, exemplary fate in the trenches of France”

“I am condemned to solitude and dark; I do not mean to hurt you” (2nd part x2)

INTERTEXTUALITY

“La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie, wisdom, death, dissolution”

“a single kiss woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”

“Les Amoureux. Never, never before… never before has the Countess cast herself a fate involving love”

“curiouser and curiouser”

“(One kiss, however, and only one, woke up the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood)”

GOTHIC SENSATIONALISM VS REALISM (Sensationalism: lust, horror, disgust, shock, opposite of sentimentalism)

“somehow obscene in their excess” “outrageous in their implications”

“protection against superstitious fears” “pure reason applied to motion”

“two-wheeled symbol of rationality vanish into the dark entrails of the mansion”

LIMINALITY

“the path too steep to ride” “hungry, thirsty, weary, dusty”

“a hand of love and death”

“delicate and damned”

“the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states”

“she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking”

“special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states”

TRANSFORMATIONS

‘Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?’ x2

“(And could love free me from the shadows?)”

“light and air streamed in; now you could see how tawdry it all was”

“its ecstatic morning song” “up and away into the clear blue bowl of the heavens”

“clinic” “eye specialist” “dentist” “manicurist”

“we shall turn her into the lovely girl she is; I shall cure her of all these nightmares”

“the end of exile is the end of being”

“far older, less beautiful, and so, for the first time, fully human”

“I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness”

SETTINGS

“dark red figured wallpaper is obscurely, distressingly patterned by the rain”

“this ornate and rotting place” “mistress of all this disintegration notices nothing”

“resemblance to a burial ground” “a huge, spiked wall that incarcerates her”

“the Countess’ larder”

“beauty of the flaming sunset” “bright, clear water”

“subtle and haunting light” “immense, rambling, a dilapidated eagle’s nest”

“the dark portals of the fatal castle”

“ritual” “wicked spell” “vile and murderous room”

NOTE: I didn't learn all of these for the exam, neither should this be considered a total, complete list. Just a handy selection of quotes that I found covered most of the main themes of The Lady of The House of Love by Angela Carter!