Barry > Barry's Quotes

“Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately.”
― Robert Aickman

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“We feel so superior to the dead.
For example, if Michelangelo was so damn smart, why'd he die?
How I feel reading the DSM is, I may be a fat stupid dummy, but I'm still alive.
The caseworker's still dead, and here's proof that everything she studied and believed in all her life
is already wrong. In the back of this edition of the DSM are the revisions from the last edition. Already, the rules have changed.
Here are the new definitions of what's acceptable, what's normal, what's sane.
Inhibited Male Orgasm is now Male Orgasmic Disorder.
What was Psychogenic Amnesia is now Dissociative Amnesia.
Dream Anxiety Disorder is now Nightmare Disorder.
Edition to edition, the symptoms change. Sane people are insane by a new standard. People who
used to be called insane are the picture of mental health.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“…inside of a year, almost all of the stuff of which you were made got regularly switched out for other stuff, as you ate and drank and breathed, and yet if you said you had the same identity you did a year ago, no one would think to call you a liar. Being is always becoming; people change and stay the same. What is true for bodies is also true for selves: even the most honest person has many faces, none of which is false.”
― Dexter Palmer

“Perhaps enlightenment, technology and secularism haven't cleared Europe of the oldest science of all - the occult.”
― Adam Nevill, Banquet for the Damned

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Good friends walk in when the old ones walk out.”
― Helen Keller

“Murder is like potato chips: you can't stop with just one.”
― Stephen King, Under the Dome

“What was it? What could it--

His last thought was surprise.”
― Peter Benchley, Beast

“The horror had begun.”
― F. Paul Wilson