Mel > Mel's Quotes

“Spring is the time of plans and projects.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“You can knock down a genuine belief, if you load up with enough facts that contradict it; but a belief that’s built on nothing except who the person wants to be, nothing can crumble that.”
― Tana French, The Trespasser

“The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing … it never stops.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“Wind hissed through the leaves overhead, and for a moment it was like being underwater–the late afternoon light shining coral red through a canopy of oak and maple leaves.”
― Laird Barron, Autumn Cthulhu

“He felt the loyalty we all feel toward unhappiness—the sense that this is where we really belong.” —Graham Greene”
― Doug Murano, Shadows Over Main Street: An Anthology of Small-Town Lovecraftian Terror

“Weyrich’s hand was key here, too. He cemented the movement’s influence in Congress by creating the Republican Study Committee, a caucus that united outside activists and conservative elected officials.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“If presence is a solid, absence is a gas, invisible and silent, filling all the available space.”
― Jonathan Oliver, Five Stories High

“Your home is your armour, your shell, your outward-facing surface, which covers the void inside, the chaos, the abyss.”
― Jonathan Oliver, Five Stories High

“The wood smoke gave the whole place the scent of autumn,”
― Ellen Datlow, The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea

“Tell ya the man’s got a private line t’Moscow,” he said. “A few men like that in office and we’re in for it, take my word.”
― Richard Matheson, The Best of Richard Matheson

“he went to clean up the library with a fellow janitor; but the moment he entered the huge room, he gasped, put his heads to his temples and fell down on one knee, gasping, “My head! My head!”
― Richard Matheson, The Best of Richard Matheson

“And this knowledge you say you’ve acquired—are you conscious of an increase in it since your ill-fated visit to the library?” Fed nodded. “I know more than ever.”
― Richard Matheson, The Best of Richard Matheson

“In this small, quiet place, filled with so many small, quiet people, they could be something they had never been.” “What?” says Mona. Parson’s face contorts into one of utter disgust. He turns to Mona, and when he speaks his contempt is almost overwhelming: “They believed they could be happy.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, American Elsewhere

“The small towns, unmoored from the highway, like ships cast adrift on a fathomless sea of grain, with silos and brick church steeples their only masts.”
― D. Alexander Ward, Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road

“Man’s reach for the sky rooted to the bones of the earth.”
― Bracken MacLeod, 13 Views of the Suicide Woods

“no longer having the counsel of your wife is akin to losing contact with the fellow war correspondent with whom you spent years deep in-country, witnessing the bad times but also the good, together with the long, rich quiet of just-another-day.”
― Michael Rutger, The Anomaly

“In a democratizing but highly unequal country, ordinary voters did not have deeply “conservative instincts” about economic policy. British Conservatives did, when necessary, give ground on economic issues and political reform. At the heart of Tory success, however, was the articulation and promotion of another set of issues that would resonate with voters. Conservatives harnessed—and, for the most part, domesticated—the forces of nationalism (by supporting and expanding the Empire), religion (by maintaining the preeminence of the Anglican church), and tradition (by backing the monarchy).”
― Jacob S. Hacker, Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality

“The rise of inequality and fall of unions are closely linked.”
― Jacob S. Hacker, Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality

“When inequality was higher, parties on the right ramped up their emphasis on divisive noneconomic issues, especially those surrounding race, ethnicity, religion, and immigration.”
― Jacob S. Hacker, Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality

“Voters are scattered all over the ideological map, but there are strikingly few that thrill to the plutocratic combination of economic conservatism and social liberalism.”
― Jacob S. Hacker, Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality

“Come, fill the Cup, in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter--and the Bird is on the Wing”
― Omar Khayyam, The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam

“Rather than turning the other cheek, they’d resolved to defend their faith and their nation, secure in the knowledge that the ends justify the means.”
― Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

“Among evangelicals, high levels of theological illiteracy mean that many “evangelicals” hold views traditionally defined as heresy, calling into question the centrality of theology to evangelicalism generally.”
― Kristin Kobes DuMez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

“It was the unhappy perception at the center of every ghost story.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“such a nation does not exist on earth, and never has existed, and never will exist until our Lord comes again.” For this reason, patriotism was no virtue; a Christian’s loyalty belonged to God’s kingdom, not to the nation.”
― Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

“I feel incapable of facing the worry I’ve caused her. My mind insists that her recent transgressions have been more severe than my own.”
― Jac Jemc, The Grip of It

“How language can sometimes only be heard in its consequences. How it can’t stop being heard after that.”
― Jac Jemc, The Grip of It

“We prize “freedom to” so much more than “freedom from.”
― Paula Guran, Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume One

“she extracts the immense pleasure that accompanies feeling sorry for one’s self after a fright, as well as a telling-off.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk