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10 Visual Representations of Literary Quotes Generated by Midjourney AI

Feb 19, 2023

What is Midjourney?

Launched in 2022, Midjourney is an art generation service. It uses artificial intelligence to create (sometimes eccentric) images from prompts users submit in a Discord channel.

Various tutorials teach how to prompt the AI bot to get results that closely resemble the image you've conjured, from the art style to the colour scheme. But I wanted to see how Midjourney's bot would respond to prose and poetry from people who've already mastered the art of putting in words the mind's eye.

I used various quotes, from quotes with literal descriptions to metaphorical and philosophical ones. The prompts that worked best seem to be a mix of all three. The AI bot needs an image as a base, and the philosophical and metaphorical give it a surreal quality that feels out of this world.

My 10 favourite results

“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.”
— T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
“It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.”
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
“The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole.”
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
— Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
“Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ”
— George Orwell, 1984
“I looked not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I would try to imagine what kind of life lived in those celestial tidal pools so far from us.”
— Jeff vandermeer, Annihilation
“It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.”
— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
“How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning?”
— Lewis Carol, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
“Their cheeks are plump and pink and shining like they’ve been eating too much sugar, but actually it’s Gossip Glow, the flushed look that comes from throwing another woman under the bus.”
— Mona Awad, Bunny

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