E.S.

“However frightening the truth may seem we have to face it, becauase being afraid of it won't make it go away. Being afraid only shrinks our minds and makes people invent myths small enough for them to cope with.”
― Ramsey Campbell, Midnight Sun

“From this there sprang an ever-present sense of insecurity together with a distrust of the homely things he cherished. With what familiar object⁠—quill, pipe, pack of cards⁠—would he be occupied, in which regular recurrent action⁠—the pulling on or off of his nightcap, the weekly auditing of his accounts⁠—would he be engaged when IT, the hidden menace, sprang out at him? And he would gaze in terror at his furniture, his walls, his pictures⁠—what strange scene might they one day witness, what awful experience might he one day have in their presence?

Hence, at times, he would gaze on the present with the agonizing tenderness of one who gazes on the past: his wife, sitting under the lamp embroidering, and retailing to him the gossip she had culled during the day; or his little son, playing with the great mastiff on the floor.

This nostalgia for what was still there seemed to find a voice in the cry of the cock, which tells of the plough going through the land, the smell of the country, the placid bustle of the farm, as happening now, all round one; and which, simultaneously, mourns them as things vanished centuries ago.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“It's a symbol. And symbols are ways of disguising what people can't bear to see clearly.”
― Ramsey Campbell, Midnight Sun

“All who knew Master Nathaniel would have been not only surprised, but incredulous, had they been told he was not a happy man. Yet such was the case. His life was poisoned at its springs by a small, nameless fear; a fear not always active, for during considerable periods it would lie almost dormant⁠—almost, but never entirely.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist