“If I am an angel, paint me with black wings.”
Anne Rice book The Vampire Armand
Source: The Vampire Armand
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory, Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?
“If I am an angel, paint me with black wings.”
Anne Rice book The Vampire Armand
Source: The Vampire Armand
“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast.”
George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement
The Destruction of Sennacherib, st. 3.
Hebrew Melodies (1815)
Source: Selected Poems
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
(31st January 1829) Lines to the Author after Reading the Sorrows of Rosalie
The London Literary Gazette, 1829
“A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools
On Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XVII Flight
“Some are haunted by ghosts. I am haunted by stories.”
Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer
The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009), afterword to "Kevin Malone", p. 355
Nonfiction
“By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,”
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic
"Dreamland", st. 1 (1845).
Context: By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule —
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE — out of TIME.