Ray Russell > Quotes

“Beelzebub is the name of Lucifer’s lieutenant. The name Beelzebub, in Hebrew, means Lord of the Flies.”
― Ray Russell, The Case Against Satan

“To paraphrase the late Christopher Hitchens, religion was mankind’s first and therefore worst tool for understanding the world. Yet for all that,”
― Ray Russell, The Case Against Satan

“If a man can be corrupted by a few books, I doubt if there was anything there to begin with.”
― Ray Russell, The Case Against Satan

“You shudder deliciously. It becomes you.”
― Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories

“The castle is situated at the terminus of a long and upward-winding mountain road. It presents a somewhat forbidding aspect to the world, for there is little about it to suggest gaiety or warmth or any of those qualities that might assure a wayfarer of welcome. Rather, this vast edifice of stone exudes an austerity, cold and repellent, a hint of ancient mysteries long buried, an effluvium of medieval dankness and decay. At night, and most particularly on nights when the moon is slim or cloud-enshrouded, it is a heavy blot upon the horizon, a shadow only, without feature save for its many-turreted outline; and should the moon be temporarily released from her cloudy confinement, her fugitive rays lend scant comfort, for they but serve to throw the castle into sudden, startling chiaroscuro, its windows fleetingly assuming the appearance of sightless though all-seeing orbs, its portcullis becoming for an instant a gaping mouth, its entire form striking the physical and the mental eye as would the sight of a giant skull.”
― Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories

“Was this humanity? Was this nobility? Was this the Christian glory that presumed to hold itself above the heathen Turk? To suffer innocents be sacrificed on an altar of corruption, merely that a lofty family be spared discomfiture? Oh, this was tenfold more abominable than the crime itself, that high authority should wink at it!”
― Ray Russell

“Man is an indolent creature, but light the fire of fear under him, and of what miracles is he not capable.”
― Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories

“Inhuman, saith I? Nay: the beasts of the field and forest, lacking all humanity, e'en the most terrible among these, slay not by long deliberate slaying and for lust. Human, then, indeed, were those fell crimes.”
― Ray Russell, Sanguinarius

“But as I sat in that bed, the book in my hands, the city outside silent, I had reason to feel as if a hand from some sub-zero hell had reached up and laid itself-oh, very gently-upon my heart.”
― Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories

“I believe it is entirely possible for a man to possess not a single one of the virtues, to be a demon in human flesh.”
― Ray Russell, Sardonicus and Other Stories

“...belief does not depend upon logic, it is a delicate and fragile flower that draws nourishment from intuition and instinct and hunch.”
― Ray Russell, Sagittarius

“offer you a veritable Oriental paradise of unlimited raptures!” He”
― Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories

“Death is a kind of nakedness, a kind of indecency, a kind of faux pas. Unless we have known the dead person well enough to experience true loss, or unless we have wronged the dead person enough to experience guilt, the only emotion we can experience is embarrassment.”
― Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories

“Now, the story makes no reference to specific years—it uses that eighteen-followed-by-a-dash business which writers were so fond of in those days, I’ve never understood why”
― Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories

“In our youth we sow wild oats; in our dotage we reap pills.”
― Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories

“A great boob he is to pit himself against a holy Father and a bishop of the Church, with the very House of God next door. The nerve of him!”
― Ray Russell, The Case Against Satan