Tales from the Nightside Quotes

“Mary Shelley, Guy Endore, Bram Stoker, leather-bound and silent while Martin laughed and strutted into the bathroom to take a quick shower. Beaumont and Bloch, Lovecraft and Leiber, tattered and yellowed while he sang a tuneless melody of a woman beautiful beyond description and the light she would bring to his starving eyes, and the words she would conjure for his inkless pen. While Saki and Dunsany stared blindly at the red rising sun.”
― Charles L. Grant, Tales from the Nightside

“The moon was a ghost in the house of night. It rose from the ashes of a sunset in crimson—silent, stained, setting free the shadows that drifted slowly round its passing. Its breath was the dark wind, drawn from catacombs of chilled and chilling dust; its voice the parchment husking of solitary leaves on solitary boughs that clawed at the night air for purchase of a soul. Few saw it without turning aside to a friend, few heard it without wishing they hadn’t known the tune.”
― Charles L. Grant, Tales from the Nightside

“A cat, owl, woman-girl screeched. Blood ran, water ran, white greyed, red glowed, and a thousand-towered castle rose and fell in stagnant green waters that loomed above scarlet mountains coated with wolves that flew like bats on broomsticks of lightning. An axe fell, guillotine hummed, knife whistled, stake thudded, and Martin smiled, holding out his arms as a road came and went beneath his naked feet. Suns came up, clouds, caves, homes of gingerbread, streets, paths, trails of thorns. There marched dolls with pink pins, men on jackals, and an out-of-step parade passed, parted over him, through him…and he was alone.”
― Charles L. Grant, Tales from the Nightside

“There was a correspondence course he failed to complete; a trip to the castles on the Rhine, Rhone, and Danube that took six years of his savings. Weekend flights to New England in desperate search of spectral Arkham, spring vacations in Haiti, Christmas in rural England, and a cold white dawn at Stonehenge. Midnights walking the streets in storms. And a year ago, the beginning of the collection that walled his study, reading and examining, hunting for a clue to the authors’ ability to write eloquently about the unspeakable, darkly about the commonplace; over and over and over again until he had memorized nearly every florid, majestic, purple, and bitter bitten paragraph. Nightmares. Sweat. The sounds of blood dripping whenever he turned a page.”
― Charles L. Grant, Tales from the Nightside

“Mrs. Radcliffe, you of all people should be glad that Gothics are all the rage. Too bad, though, because they’re mutants, you know, hideous, monstrous travesties of every honest fear man ever had.” Another book, another toss. “Mr. Machen, did you know that you and your kind have been called old-fashioned? Out-of-date and worn in a worn, cynical world. Poe, an ass; Hawthorne a pansy.”
― Charles L. Grant, Tales from the Nightside

“when he realized they were probably waiting for midnight. The magical hour.”
― Charles L. Grant, Tales from the Nightside