Entrail

“ Open, open, hell's gates!
Shut, shut, heaven's gates!
All the devils in the air
The stronger be, that hear the Black Prayer!
(Looking round the church.)
What a darksome and dismal place!
I wonder that any man has the face
To call such a hole the House of the Lord,
And the Gate of Heaven,--yet such is the word.
Ceiling, and walls, and windows old,
Covered with cobwebs, blackened with mould;
Dust on the pulpit, dust on the stairs,
Dust on the benches, and stalls, and chairs! ”

“ Inch by inch, the wind contests the ground; another struggle, and he stands upon the veranda. On such occasions I make it a point to open the door myself, with a calmness and serenity that shall offer a marked contrast to his feverish and excited air, and shall throw suspicion of inebriety upon him. If he be inclined to timidity and bashfulness, during the best of the evening he is all too conscious of the disarrangement of his hair and cravat. ”

“ From some high attic window, perhaps, where you stand and watch, listen to that wind of sighs that rises, almost articulate with the pains and sorrows, the half-caught joys, too, from that crowded human world beneath the sea of roofs and tiles. ”

“ The first sight of the entrance is gorgeous, full of Eastern colour and charm; and then sorrow and horror fill one’s heart, as one’s eyes fall suddenly upon the rows of lepers who line the way to the holy place. Each is a terrible, gruesome sight, a mass of ghastly corruption and disease, and each holds out with maimed, distorted hands a little tin vessel for your alms. ”

“ If you can put your five fingers throught it, it is a gate, if not a door. ”

“ You pass through the grand breadth and height of a squalid entrance-way, and perhaps see a range of dusky pillars, forming a sort of cloister round the court, and in the intervals, from pillar to pillar, are strewn fragments of antique statues, headless and legless torsos, and busts that have invariably lost—what it might be well if living men could lay aside in that unfragrant atmosphere—the nose. ”

“ We see this in the papering of rooms, for how painful is the sensation of being in a small room, the walls of which are covered with a pattern that seems to make them come near, and almost close upon us, like the iron tomb which grew less and less every night, though by almost imperceptible degrees. ”

“ Every little habitation within the great foul nest of one high building—that is to say, the room or rooms within every door that opened on the general staircase—left its own heap of refuse on its own landing, besides flinging other refuse from its own windows. ”

“ To me the stretch of sky and water, with its dividing band of roof, tower and wharf, stretching from the loop of steel—that spider-web of the mighty—to the straight line of the sea, is a never-ending delight. ”

“ Enter ye in by the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many are they that enter in thereby. For narrow is the gate, and straitened the way, that leadeth unto life, and few are they that find it. ”

“ So small, a man might hardly enter there,
Low-browed and shadowed, and close-pressed to earth—
A very needle's eye—scarce visible.
I looked and wondered. Could this trivial way
Be the sole entrance to the light of day?
And as I stood perplext, a clear voice cried,—
Come! Enter in! The Gate is open wide. ”

“ A fringe of shadowy watchers crept from cavernous doorways, sensed it, and commenced to wail eerily. Backward and forward, in a space no larger than a small room, the heaving, inseparable mass rocked and swayed. ”

“ I stepped out swiftly, and breathing deeply in that new sense of safety, peered above me into the darkness of the stairway. A sound as of some person moving stealthily came down to me; and, encouraged by this evidence of human life, as well as inspired with a fresh and flowing anger, I made up the steps, groping and feeling my way. ”

“ Rows and rows of smug, well-built houses, each with a front garden, each with a front gate, and each front gate remains shut against the casual caller until you have rung a bell—and the occupants have had time to make up their minds about you from behind the window curtains—when some mechanism in the vestibule is set in motion, the gate opens, and you walk in. ”

“ The wall replied: "I may be strong, but a rat can scratch a hole through me."
"Oh, rat, you must be strong to scratch a hole through the wall that keeps the sun from melting the snow that clogs my little feet." ”

“ The principal one is not to be explored without much precaution, and without a safe guide. The entrance, which is low and narrow, leads to a spacious amphitheater, the petrifactions hanging from the roof of which have a most splendid effect by the light of torches. ”

“ Round and round in spiral form we descended for many miles, amid noises loud and new to me, when our farther progress was abruptly stopped by a massive door formed in the solid rock, and which was guarded by monsters of various shapes, called Ignorance. ”

“ Sometimes seated on a rock from hour to hour, looming through mist and drizzle, like a solitary heron watching for its prey. He was well acquainted with every hole and corner of the Sound; from the Wallabout to Hell Gate, and from Hell Gate even unto the Devil’s Stepping Stones ”

“ There is a staircase to heaven. By ascending millions of steps heaven is reached. My poem has also a staircase; these tasteless verses are the steps. If you can't climb these few steps, how will you ascend the heavenly ladder? ”

“ Granted that you are out-of-doors; but what if the outer door is open, if the inner door is shut! You must walk sometimes perfectly free, not prying nor inquisitive, not bent upon seeing things. Throw away a whole day for a single expansion, a single inspiration of air. ”

“ To fasten the door on the inside, is to denounce myself as plainly as if I had written above, ‘No admittance,—the king is within!’ Even now, sire, at this very moment, there is nothing to prevent the door opening, and your majesty being seen here. ”

“ Only a week later the cellar walls were standing, and I was able to step inside and look out of a window. The entire aspect of the world undergoes some subtle, psychological transformation from the moment when first you survey it out of your own window. ”

“ You may at some time or other have been going down a dark staircase, perhaps in some old tower, and the steps have been so even for a long time that you think you know just how far down to put your foot for the next, when suddenly there comes a short step or an extra long step which gives you quite a shock. ”

“ Our only entrance will be a hole, about the size of a man’s body, low down, on the river side; and to use it, everybody will have to crawl in or out on his stomach, and cross the big ditch by means of a plank. ”

“ So up the stairs she raced, and into a room, spacious, brilliant with lights, crystal chandeliers, and the massive gilt frames of famous landscapes, as film and story have so often shown us—too often, it is to be feared, to the dispelling of the fascinating mystery. ”

“ The gates of heaven and hell, the gates of death and darkness, the wide and narrow gates that lead to destruction and life (Matt. vii. 13 and 14) , are familiar metaphorical phrases in the Bible. In Greek and Roman legend dreams pass through gates of transparent horn if true, if deceptive and false through opaque gates of ivory (Hom. Od. xix. 560 sq.; Virg. Aen. vi. 893) . (C. We.) ”

“ Do you know of any other mode of exit from your house than by the front or back doors and the staircase? Have you a rope at home which would support a man’s weight, and extend from an upper window to the ground? ”

“ A second door which opens into the interior of the house is also ajar, and a man’s head, with smiling face, which I should never have recognised to be that of my father, is looking in; the beautiful, blooming, fair-haired creature being, however, too much occupied with the lovely vision she was contemplating in the mirror to be aware of the presence of the intruder. ”

“ I go through at a low door, find myself under benches filled with an eager, stamping, shouting multitude, make my way through a passage, and come out on the shady side, for it is a late afternoon sun, and take my place at a good point of view. ”

“ The portal to a glorious temple may be through a dark and dreary narthex, to be traversed painfully, it may be on one's knees, a passage only illuminated in its last stages by exhilarating bursts of light as the door ahead momentarily swings open. ”

“ GATE, an opening into any enclosure for entrance or exit, capable of being closed by a barrier at will. The word is of wide application, embracing not only the defensive entrance ways into a fortified place, with which this article mainly deals, or the imposing architectural features which form the main entrances to palaces, colleges, monastic buildings, &c., but also the common five-barred barrier which closes an opening into a field. ”

“ There are two gates from which flitting dreams are sent to men: one is of horn, and the other of ivory: and the dreams which pass through the ivory gate are sent to beguile, while those which come from the gate of horn are a true message to him who sees them. ”

“ Our susceptibilities, the discovery of our powers, manifold experiences—our various experiences of the coming and going of bodily pain, for instance—belong to this or the other well-remembered place in the material habitation—that little white room with the window across which the heavy blossoms could beat so peevishly in the wind, with just that particular catch or throb, such a sense of teasing in it, on gusty mornings; and the early habitation thus gradually becomes a sort of material shrine or sanctuary of sentiment ”

“ It soothly is, removed far within.
'Tis the same sort as objects peered upon
Outside in their true shape, whene'er a door
Yields through itself an open peering-place,
And lets us see so many things outside
Beyond the house. Also that sight is made
By a twofold twin air: for first is seen
The air inside the door-posts; next the doors,
The twain to left and right; and afterwards
A light beyond comes brushing through our eyes,
Then other air, then objects peered upon
Outside in their true shape. ”

“ Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." ”

“ In case of fire, you step into a sort of trapeze, which is attached to the wire by a grooved wheel, and your descent to the ground is something like the 'slide for life,' often seen at the circus, or in film melodramas. I can see how, in the dark, it would give the illusion of flying. ”

“ A door of utterance - Θυραν του λογου· The word θυρα, which commonly signifies a door, or such like entrance into a house or passage through a wall, is often used metaphorically for an entrance to any business, occasion or opportunity to commence or perform any particular work. ”

“ Eternally that stifling reek arises, Blotting the dome with smoky, terrible towers, Black, strangling trees, whispering obscene things Amongst their branches, clutching with maimed hands, Or oozing slowly, like blind tentacles Up to the gates ”

“ The ladder which thou sawest, which had twelve steps having two human faces which changed their appearance—now this ladder is this age, and the twelve steps are the times of this age, and the twenty-four faces are the kings of the lawless heathen of this age. ”

“ I passed the roof of the porte-cochère with success, climbed on to the ledge leading outside of the servants' wing, the letter safe within my bosom. There I began again my feeling of the window sills, this time with the added wish for clinging to them for support as well as their enumeration, for this was the most perilous portion of my undertaking, there being only a gutter along the ledge, and no railing of any sort. ”

“ The entrance of a woman into a sacred place, less than forty days after her accouchement, or the entrance of a man who had touched an impure animal, constituted a pollution of the House of the Lord. When one wishes to make a parade of erudition he should make some attempt to understand the things which he pretends to make clear to others. ”

“ It was possible for a man to walk along on the roofs of the other buildings and come down on the roof opposite his quarters, but why should any one suspect him of carrying the ring, and know where to find it? ”

“ He saw a door which stood ajar, and through which he distinctly heard sighs, mingled with sobs. He pushed open the door with his bill, but remained on the threshold, astonished at the sight which met his eyes. ”