Strong delusions travel like cold germs on a sneeze.
What comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in every breath, you see it in every shadow, you expect to plunge into it at every turn of a step.
Or perhaps it was the voice of the Darker Girl.
The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one’s papers and identification pretty much in order.
When you empty out the vessel, you also empty out all the crap floating around in there. The additives. The impurities. It sure feels good. It’s a whole body, whole-minded enema.
The trap had a ghastly perfection.
I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of some growing, coalescing force; I seemed to smell the bitter ozone aroma of lightings-to-come.
Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heard clearly in the dreams of later years.
Eventual, as Pug used to say. When he wanted to say something was really good, he’s never say it was awesome, like most people do; he’d say it was eventual. How funny is that? The old Pugmeister. I wonder how he’s doing.
Any fool who can pucker is apt to whistle past the graveyard.
The smell of oil in the air was huge and furry.
That had to be the answer. When you heard hoofbeats, you didn’t think zebras.
Creepy as hell. You ever see that TV movie about the clown in the sewer?
One does not always need to hear a slam to know that the door has been closed.
Wear it home, it’ll look like a dress.
Y cuando uno es mas listo no deja de arrancar las alas a las moscas, lo que ocurre es que, en ese momento, busca mejores razones para hacerlo.
The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary.
There’s a crying shortage of pretty things in the slam, and the real pity of it is that a lot of men don’t even seem to miss them.
If you find a footnote, ” a library-science prof once told a class of which I was a part, “step on its head and kill it before it can breed.
Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.