Doug Bolden > Doug's Quotes

“Ideas on earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enimity.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“[August] Derleth tried to prevent any other (non-Derleth-approved) writer from writing Cthulhu Mythos stories.If Lovecraft had wanted bad writers to avoid Cthulhu Mythos stories, he wouldn’t have written back to August Derleth.”
― Kenneth Hite, Cthulhu 101*OP

“Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

“Cthulhu seems like kind of a wuss if he can be trapped by a sinking island or killed by a boat."

"That’s just because the stars aren’t right. When the stars are right, it don’t matter how many boats hit him. He’ll sink whole continents and lick off the people like salt off a pretzel."

"Says you."

"You keep talking smack like that, he’s gonna eat you first.”
― Kenneth Hite, Cthulhu 101*OP

“Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought. And because the theater was fiction made flesh, she hated the theater most of all. But that was it—hate was exactly the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned.”
― Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

“The kicking and punching stopped only when it became apparent that all the mob was attacking was itself. And, since the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters, it was never very clear to anyone what had happened.”
― Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

“In the center of the sofa were two oblong companion pillows, shouldered so closely together that they looked like the Decalogue tablets. They were white, or had been white, and painfully stitched upon them with blue thread were companion mottoes, companion pictures. In the left pillow lies a girl, her long blue hair asprawl about her face, her eyes innocently shut, asleep. The motto: I SLEPT AND DREAMED THAT LIFE WAS BEAUTY. But the story continued, and on the next pillow her innocence is all torn away: there she stands, gripping a round broom; her hair now is pinned up severely and behind her sits a disheartening barrel churn. I WOKE AND FOUND THAT LIFE WAS DUTY. The pillows sat, stuffed and stiff as disapproving bishops; they could, he thought, serve as twin tombstones for whole gray generations.”
― Fred Chappell, Dagon

“What can she do but shrink with terror? Soon she is only doll-size in dark doll’s costume. Quivering bones and feverish blood are the stuffings of this doll, its entrails tickled by fear’s funereal plume. It flies to a corner of the room and cringes within enormous shadows, sometimes dreaming there throughout the night—of carriage wheels rioting in a lavender mist or a pearly fog, of nacreous fires twitching beyond the margins of country roads, of cliffs and stars.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

“Every story needs to be told in just the right way.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

“In the seventeenth century there occurred the spiritual possession by divers demons of the nuns belonging to the Ursuline convent at Aix-en-Provence. Excommunication was soon in coming for the blighted sisters, who had been seduced into assorted blasphemies by the likes of Grésil, Sonnillon, and Vérin. De Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal respectively characterizes these demons, in the words of an unknown translator, as “the one who glistens horribly like a rainbow of insects; the one who quivers in a horrible manner; and the one who moves with a particular creeping motion.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

“Thus, his ambition led him not to relieve his patients’ madness, but to exasperate it—to let it breathe with a life of its own. And this he did in certain ways that wholly eradicated what human attributes remained in these people. But sometimes that peculiar magic he saw in their eyes would seem to fade, and then he would institute his ‘proper treatment,’ which consisted of putting them through a battery of hellish ordeals intended to loosen their attachment to the world of humanity and to project them further into the realm of the ‘silent, staring universe’ where the insanity of the infinite might work a rather paradoxical cure. The result was something as pathetic as a puppet and as exalted as the stars, something at once dead and never dying, a thing utterly without destiny and thus imperishable, forever consigned to that abysmal vacuity which is the essence of all that is immortal.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

“In supernatural horror stories, however, magical thinking is a completely different matter. Those characters contending with what seems to be the work of magic will deny till the very last moment that anything magical is going on. They will invoke reason and evidence and eek out corroborations for the cause of their problems. But readers of these stories are rarely, if ever, on the side of these characters. They desperately want to believe that there is indeed something magical going on and they are primed to accept it whenever it occurs. Some readers especially enjoy a story with bad magic, as it assures them that magic is confined to fiction and will not leak into their real lives. This is the most perverse form of magical thinking and the one least likely to be recognized as such.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory, Vol. 2

“As a token bit of mysticism, the mason had fixed an Eye of God way up on the steeple, above the clock - an oval shape carved into a block of stone that I'd noticed on the old country churches Farther dragged us round at weekends. Yet at Saint Jude's, it seemed more like a sharp-eyed overseer of the factory floor, looking out for the workshy and the seditious.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“In his last years, he made himself available to counsel people distressed about their supernatural experiences. As he wrote to one of them: it is not a matter of disturbances emanating from outside, but of disturbances emerging unconsciously from within you. . . .”
― Gary William Crawford, ROBERT AICKMAN: AN INTRODUCTION

“There are no beautiful clocks. Everything to do with time is hideous.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

“Colon in particular had great difficulty with the idea that you went on investigating after someone had confessed. It outraged his training and experience. You got a confession and there it ended. You didn’t go around disbelieving people. You disbelieved people only when they said they were innocent. Only guilty people were trustworthy. Anything”
― Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

“If the wheels of the universe are in true, then good always compensates for evil—but good can be awful as well.”
― Stephen King, It