Quotations

"Sequentia: Dies Irae" translation from requiemsurvey.org

"What Power Art Thou" from by John Dryden from King Arthur, Act III by Henry Purcell:

What power art thou, who from below
Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow?
See'st thou not how stiff and wondrous old
Far unfit to bear the bitter cold,
I can scarcely move or draw my breath?
Let me, let me freeze again to death

Portrait of of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce:

He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured. Weakness and timidity and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment. (p.67)

His very brain was sick and powerless. He could scarcely interpret the letters of the signboards of the shops. By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him. He could respond to no earthly or human appeal, dumb and insensible to the call of summer and gladness and companionship, wearied and dejected by his father's voice. He could scarcely recognise as his own thoughts, and repeated slowly to himself:
 —I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names. (p. 98)

Excerpt from "The Confiteor of the Artist" from Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire translated by A. S. Kline:

How penetrating the end of the autumn days! Ah, penetrating to the point of pain! Because there are certain delicious sensations whose vagueness does not exclude intensity; and there is no sharper point than that of the Infinite.
 The pure delight of drowning one’s gaze in the immensity of sky and sea! The solitude, the silence, the incomparable chastity of the azure, some little quivering sail on the horizon which by its smallness and isolation imitates my irremediable existence, the monotonous melody of the swell, all these things think through me, or I think through them (since, in the grandeur of reverie, the ‘I’ is soon lost)! They think, I say, but musically and picturesquely, without quibbles, without syllogisms, without deductions.