In any event, whether a supernatural tale remains altogether fantastic or eventually modulates to the uncanny or the marvelous, the reader is faced with disconcerting ontological and perceptual problems.Indeed, the disorienting effect of the supernatural encounter in fiction seems to reflect some deeper disorientations in the culture at large.

It is always the simple that produces the marvelous.

#Cats are marvelous creatures - they either adapt to circumstances, or decide to make circumstances adapt to them. Either way - they win.

So yeah, maybe this will be the rest of our lives. Pot roast and Diet Cokes and my parents making eyes at each other. As for those slaps and punches and hateful words, we'll just sweep those under the rug or wherever they can go.

Supernatural fiction contains its own generic borderland: a neutral territory, which Tzvetan Todorov calls 'the fantastic,' between 'the marvelous' and 'the uncanny.' According to Todorov, 'The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.' Once the event is satisfactorily explained (and sometimes it is never explained), we have left the fantastic for an adjacent genre - either 'the uncanny,' where the apparently supernatural is revealed as illusory, or 'the marvelous,' where the laws of ordinary reality must be revised to incorporate the supernatural. As long as uncertainty reigns, however, we are in the ambiguous realm of the fantastic.

I pray that I am sufficiently stirred by the rumor of great things to seek the God who created this single thread that I am, and to marvel at a vision magnificent enough to cause this God to weave from this single thread a tapestry most resplendent.

Home should never be dark or full of shadows and secrets. It should be bright and full of open doors. It should be full of stories wanting to be told.

There are a thousand beautiful things behind that look. A marvelous sort of ache that only a few people know about. Some miraculous sort of sorrow she's managed to walk away from.

Oh no, Raphael, please don't leave me,' Magnus said in a monotone. 'Where would I be without the light of your sweet smile? If you go, I will throw myself upon the ground and weep.' 'Will you?' asked Raphael, raising one thin eyebrow. 'Because if you do, I will stay and watch the show.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes.