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

“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