The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales Quotes

“A pessimist is a liar, unless he destroys himself, and no less of a hypocrite than a priest who defiles the holy.”
― Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales

“One senses that it is a region of cosmic antiquity, and that man is no more significant here than any other of the insects that crawl in the dust.”
― Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales

“But always I encountered only those with television eyes whose own imaginative vision had dimmed, those whose values were formed by the irresistible tsunami of gossip and infotainment. Those whose gazes were fixed on bright plasma and LED screens, those addicted to shows where the value of a person was determined by his ability to entertain, to financially enrich or to sexually arouse, an agenda driven in turn by those who were drained of their own thought-processes by the media’s mental vampires.”
― Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales

“The New Revolution will be when the unknown masses rise up to destroy the power behind celebrity. This power creates the idiot sports players, cretinous pop stars and soap opera mannequins who hypnotise the masses.”
― Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales

“Any honest liar can write acclaimed fiction. Nowadays the reading public don’t care about anything other than a cheap thrill. That’s all they’ve ever wanted.”
― Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales

“Books were utterly worthless. He understood that no one ever wrote without the result being warped by his or her own prejudices and ego. […] For the vast majority of people, books were simply ornaments to a room, advertising their owners’ intellectual vanity. One in a million books was ever re-read and the so-called classics were mostly dipped into and unadmittedly discarded or force-read. Not though by academics, who canonised these “classics” and lived like parasites on the obscurity they generated. The masses were as vile in their own way. They read drivel churned out by illiterates. These illiterate authors had allowed themselves to become “product”. And then there was the worst of all: books that instructed us on how to live, when to turn to such books was a symptom of the disease, not its cure.”
― Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales

“Relieved from the onus of developing a measure of stoic acceptance of life’s vicissitudes, I found respite in a grand conspiracy theory in which the cosmos was intrinsically malignant to men. Intrinsically, but not consciously, malignant, you will note; rather like a natural poison-zone, in which sentience was an aberration of such jarring uniqueness that it could be nothing other than doomed to final destruction when confronted with the revelation of an ultimate, dead, and bleak reality.”
― Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales

“For, in truth, is not all human philosophy simply the piling up of one word after another in a self-absorbed train of thought and justification?”
― Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales

“I had long ago determined that I would devote my life to literary scholarship. Not, let me emphasise, the dry-as-dust scholarship of academe, the crushing orthodoxy to be found in universities, but rather the recondite scholarship that is a journey into the unknown. I refer, chiefly, to those dead authors whose works savour of the uncanny and the marvellous, authors whose unique perspectives are beyond the self-stultifying purview of the modern critical mania for so-called realism. For my part I chose the mysteries, and the hierophant of mystery was an obscure author called Arthur Machen.”
― Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales