The Weird and the Eerie Quotes

“We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining nature's products into hideous new forms.”
― Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

“In this lukewarm world, ambient discontent hides in plain view, a hazy malaise given off by the refrigerators, television sets and other consumer durables. The vividness and plausibility of this miserable world — with misery itself contributing to the world’s plausibility — somehow becomes all the more intense when its status is downgraded to that of a constructed simulation. The world is a simulation but it still feels real.”
― Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

“The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.”
― Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

“The novel's trick involved re-telling a classic Faery story —young women abducted into another world— using the conventions of realism. One of these conventions was giving the event a precise date. According to the novel, the three women disappeared on February 14th 1900... But Picnic at Hanging Rock is not set in our 1900, in which February 14th fell on a Wednesday, not a Saturday.”
― Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

“The feeling of the eerie is very different from that of the weird. The simplest way to get to this difference is by thinking about the (highly metaphysically freighted) opposition — perhaps it is the most fundamental opposition of all — between presence and absence. As we have seen, the weird is constituted by a presence — the presence of that which does not belong. In some cases of the weird (those with which Lovecraft was obsessed) the weird is marked by an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it. The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something.”
― Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

“the distinction between alien and human is fatally unsettled”
― Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie