Dracula's Guest Quotes

“This was Walpurgis Night! Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad—when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was alone—unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me!”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“he saw her as she was—a hideous phantom of the corruption of the ages.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“now the wind that had raged round the castle had died down to a low moaning in the pine trees—a whimpering of time-worn agony.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“Her fascination was stronger than ever, but it was not a natural fascination—not that of a normal woman, such as she had been. It was the fascination of a Circe, of a witch, of an enchantress—and as such was irresistible.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“And there are certain people—I could think of several myself—who seem to depress one and undermine one’s energies, quite unconsciously of course, but one feels somehow that vitality has passed from oneself to them.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“she was a dreadful woman; and she was, that’s true enough, but sometimes I have wondered lately if she knew it—if she wa’n’t like a baby with scissors in its hand cuttin’ everybody without knowin’ what it was doin’.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“Grant,” I said solemnly, “that we must do, each in his own way. God helps those who help themselves, and by His help and the light of my knowledge we must fight this battle for Him and the poor lost soul within.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“He had seen terrible faces in the hospital—faces on which disease had set dreadful marks—but he had never seen a face that impressed him so painfully as this withered countenance, with its indescribable horror of death outlived, a face that should have been hidden under a coffin-lid years and years ago.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“The public couldn’t get enough; writers such as Braddon reaped a new financial harvest with every book. She admitted that she cranked out some volumes as bill-paying hack work. Once she complained to Bulwer Lytton that “the amount of crime, treachery, murder, slow poisoning & general infamy required by the halfpenny reader is something terrible,”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“You did me great injustice, dear lady, if you thought for a moment I would propose anything disagreeable to you, unless demanded by the sternest necessity,”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“Oh, I beg your pardon; I do not know—” he stammered. “What to make of me,” interrupted the other. “You would therefore do well to believe just what I tell you, or at least to avoid making conjectures of your own, which will lead to nothing.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“Who is not either the pursuer or the pursued? All persecute or are persecuted, and Fate persecutes all,” replied the stranger without looking at him.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“It breathed. I felt its warm breath upon my cheek. It struggled fiercely. It had hands. They clutched me. Its skin was smooth, just like my own. There it lay, pressed close up against me, solid as stone—and yet utterly invisible!”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“Then his daughter-in-law, dragging her children behind her, threw one of them to him; he caught the child on the sharpened point of his stake. Using the stake as a catapult, he slung the creature towards me with all his might. I fended off the blow, but with the true terrier instinct the little brat sunk his teeth into my horse’s neck, and I had some difficulty tearing him away. The other child was propelled towards me in the same way, but he landed beyond the horse and was crushed to pulp.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“Thus were they most anxious for that which was to prove their destruction:—yet do we not all aspire after that which conducts us to the grave—after the enjoyment of life? These innocents stretched out their arms to approaching death, because it assumed the mask of pleasure;”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“do we not all aspire after that which conducts us to the grave—”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“Such will in the latter days of the earth, be the last generation of mortals, when child-bearing shall have ceased, when youth shall no more be seen, nor any arise to replace those who shall await their fate in silence.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“I could still gather from the whole that he was a being of no common order, and one who, whatever pains he might take to avoid remark, would still be remarkable.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“While dining, the bats inject their victims with an anticoagulant enzyme to keep the nutrients flowing smoothly. And what might this glycoprotein be called? Draculin, of course. You may consume it yourself one day. Draculin’s four-hundred-plus amino acids are many times stronger than any other known anticoagulant; as a consequence, a drug derived from it, desmoteplase, has been approved for victims of stroke or heart attack.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“animals luxuriate in soullessness and thus appeal less to the undead.”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“THE DEAD TRAVEL FAST”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

“So what can we generalize about Victorian vampires? They are already dead, yet not exactly dead, and clammy-handed. They can be magnetically repelled by crucifixes and they don’t show up in mirrors. No one is safe; vampires prey upon strangers, family, and lovers. Unlike zombies, vampires are individualists, seldom traveling in packs and never en masse. Many suffer from mortuary halitosis despite our reasonable expectation that they would no longer breathe. But our vampires herein also differ in interesting ways. Some fear sunlight; others do not. Many are bound by a supernatural edict that forbids them to enter a home without some kind of invitation, no matter how innocently mistaken. Dracula, for example, greets Jonathan Harker with this creepy exclamation that underlines another recurring theme, the betrayal of innocence (and also explains why I chose Stoker’s story “Dracula’s Guest” as the title of this anthology): “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will.” Yet other vampires seem immune to this hospitality prohibition. One common bit of folklore was that you ought never to refer to a suspected vampire by name, yet in some tales people do so without consequence. Contrary to their later presentation in movies and television, not all Victorian vampires are charming or handsome or beautiful. Some are gruesome. Some are fiends wallowing in satanic bacchanal and others merely contagious victims of fate, à la Typhoid Mary. A few, in fact, are almost sympathetic figures, like the hero of a Greek epic who suffers the anger of the gods. Curious bits of other similar folklore pop up in scattered places. Vampires in many cultures, for example, are said to be allergic to garlic. Over the centuries, this aromatic herb has become associated with sorcerers and even with the devil himself. It protected Odysseus from Circe’s spells. In Islamic folklore, garlic springs up from Satan’s first step outside the Garden of Eden and onion from his second. Garlic has become as important in vampire defense as it is in Italian cooking. If, after refilling your necklace sachet and outlining your window frames, you have some left over, you can even use garlic to guard your pets or livestock—although animals luxuriate in soullessness and thus appeal less to the undead. The vampire story as we know it was born in the early nineteenth century. As”
― Michael Sims, Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories