E.S.

“To help us not to remember what we're afraid of, what the human race has invented whole religions to conceal. All religions are like stories people told by the fire when there was nothing but the fire and stories to keep off the cold and the dark, because people couldn't bear to know what was out there beyond the light.”
― Ramsey Campbell, Midnight Sun

“A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself, must, in the nature of things, be different from that same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Imprisonment gives off an unpleasant smell. Remnants of macerating evil thoughts, the effluvia of dirty ideas that have been hanging around too long, the bitter whiff of old regrets. Fresh air, by definition, never enters here. We breathe in our own breath in this bell jar, we share the atmosphere shot through with shards off brown chicken and dark intentions. Our clothes, our sheets and our skin end up saturated with these fumes, and there is no getting used to them. When we return from the exercise yard, and the outside air is halted at the turnstiles, the transition is always sudden, and the vague nausea is there to remind us that we live and breathe in a belly pushing us along in its laborious digestion, and then, when the time comes, it will expel us to free itself, not to give us back our freedom.”
― Jean-Paul Dubois, Not Everybody Lives the Same Way

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