Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward Gorey

Gorey makes creation sound like a parlor trick performed on his own brain: casual, almost bored, yet meticulously controlled. "Conjured" suggests magic, but it’s stage magic, not revelation. The subconscious becomes a prop closet he can raid at will, and the tone - "just kind of" - is a deliberate shrug that undercuts the romantic myth of the tortured artist. He’s telling you he doesn’t receive visions; he arranges them.

That second move is the real Gorey: "put them in order of ascending peculiarity". Even strangeness, in his hands, gets cataloged. The phrase carries a prim, librarian-like humor, implying an internal filing system where oddity is not a rupture but a measurable variable. It’s a sly confession of craft: the macabre and absurd in his books feel dreamlike, but they’re engineered for pacing, escalation, and payoff. Peculiarity becomes a gradient, not an accident.

Subtextually, he’s also protecting the work from psychoanalytic scavenging. If the images are "out of my subconscious" yet immediately sorted, then they’re not pure autobiography begging to be decoded; they’re raw material. Context matters here: Gorey’s drawings and narratives trade in Victorian manners, childlike cruelty, and deadpan catastrophe. That mix lands because it’s disciplined. By presenting himself as both medium and editor, he explains why his worlds feel coherent even when they’re grotesque: the weirdness isn’t spilling out; it’s being curated, with a raised eyebrow.