Brian Lumley > Quotes

“Blood is the life.”
― Brian Lumley, Necroscope

“The future is a devious thing.”
― Brian Lumley

“But while our parting was mutually acceptable and even expedient, still it was painful. And I would like to think it hurt both of us, for I certainly felt it: a wrenching inside, like some small but improbably necessary organ was no longer in there, that it was missing, torn or fallen out. And at the time I'd thought that was the end of it; what was missing was gone forever”
― Brian Lumley, The Ghost Quartet

“It was not only the absence of light but the absence of everything. He might be at the core of a black hole, except a black hole has enormous gravity and this place had none. In one sense it was a metaphysical plane of existence, but in another it was not – because nothing existed here. It was simply a ‘place’, but a place in which no God as yet had uttered those wonderful words of evocation, ‘Let there be light!”
― Brian Lumley, Necroscope!

“Our human race is a colony of ants, Mr. Lawton, inhabiting an anthill at the edge of a limitless chasm called infinity.”
― Brian Lumley, The Taint and Other Novellas

“That is not dead which can forever lie, And with strange aeons even death may die…”
― Brian Lumley, The Compleat Crow

“On monoliths did ancients carve their warnings
To those who use night's forces lest they bring
A doom upon themselves that when, in mourning
They be the mourned...”
― Brian Lumley, Haggopian and Other Stories

“Consider: I am, or was, a meteorologist of some note—a man whose interests and leanings have always been away from fantasy and the so-called “supernatural”and yet now I believe in a wind that blows between the worlds, and in a Being that inhabits that wind, striding in feathery cirrus and shrieking lightning storm alike across icy Arctic heavens.”
― Brian Lumley, The Taint and Other Novellas

“Where Ragnar’s Bauta-stein she found, And writ in ancient, northern rune, A curse upon’t before his tomb. The stone was raised in forest bower, Where died the Dame in that same hour, And Seasnake’s lads, all sore dismayed, Beside her son the witch-wife laid…”
― Brian Lumley, The Compleat Crow

“Out in the garden, a sudden stirring of wind. The hedgerow trembling and last year’s leaves blowing across my drive. And birds startled to flight, as by the sudden presence of someone or thing I could not see. And the sudden gathering and rushing of spiralling winds, dust-devils that sucked up leaves and grit and other bits of debris and shot them aloft. Dust-devils, Henri, in March—in England—half-a-dozen of them that paraded all about Blowne House for the best part of thirty minutes! In any other circumstance, a marvellous, fascinating phenomenon.”
― Brian Lumley, The Compleat Crow

“You have told me, Dragosani, how many of my greatest deeds are now accorded to the Vlads, and how I am reduced to a ghost for frightening children. More than this, my very name will have been stricken from the old records, for that was their way in those days. If they feared something they destroyed it and pretended it had never been.”
― Brian Lumley, Necroscope

“Titus Crow is an occult investigator, a psychic sleuth, an agent for Good in the detection and destruction of Evil. During WWII, as a young man, he worked for the War Department; his work in London was concerned with cracking Nazi codes and advising on Hitler’s predilection for the occult: those dark forces which Der Führer attempted to enlist in his campaign for world domination. Following the end of the war, and from then on right through a very active life which encompassed many “hobbies,” he fought Satan wherever he found him and with whichever tools of his trade were available to him at the time. Crow became, in fact, a world-acknowledged master in such subjects as magic, specifically the so-called “Black Books” of various necromancers and wizards, and their doubtful arts; in archaeology, paleontology, cryptography, antiques and antiquities in general; in obscure or avant-garde works of art—with particular reference to such as Aubrey Beardsley, Chandler Davies, Hieronymous Bosch, Richard Upton Pickman, etc.—in the dimly forgotten or neglected mythologies of Earth’s prime, and in anthropology in general, to mention but a handful.”
― Brian Lumley, The Compleat Crow

“From one point of view: “No man ever knew Titus Crow better than I did; and yet his personality was such that whenever I met him—however short the intervening time since our last meeting—I would always be impressed anew by his stature, his leonine good looks, and by the sheer weight of intellect which invariably shone out from behind those searching eyes of his…” And from another: “He was tall and broad-shouldered and it was plain to see that in his younger days he had been a handsome man. Now his hair had greyed a little and his eyes, though they were still very bright and observant, bore the imprint of many a year spent exploring—and often, I guessed, discovering—along rarely trodden paths of mysterious and obscure learning…” Mysterious, obscure learning…”
― Brian Lumley, The Compleat Crow

“What the hell’s maths? Star Trek on the telly and a stack of brand new Marvel comics in the newsagent’s—and I expect them to study numbers! God! And just wait another year or so, till they start to notice those funny lumps on girls—as if they haven’t already! And again: Maths? Hopeless!”
― Brian Lumley, Necroscope

“Crow had few peers in the years before…before his transition. But of that latter—change—sufficient has already been recorded elsewhere. A one-time writer of macabre short stories, he occasionally chronicled his own adventures; at other times such work was undertaken by his lifelong friend Henri-Laurent de Marigny (son of Etienne, the world-famous New Orleans mystic), while others of his adventures were reported by mere acquaintances. All of the Titus Crow adventures, in short story or novelette form, are here collected in one volume. They are presented chronologically, as best as may be determined, and along with The Burrowers Beneath and the “post-transition” novels, they complete the Crow canon. In addition to the tales in which Titus Crow is a primary actor, there are three other closely related stories: The Mirror of Nitocris, the one and only personal chronicle of Crow’s apprentice and fellow traveller, de Marigny; Inception, in which Crow plays only a cameo role; and lastly The Black Recalled, in which nothing of Crow appears at all! …Or does it? Only one thing remains to be said. In the light of Titus Crow’s fascination and lifelong affair with matters of dark concern, much of this volume is naturally taken up with narratives of relentless horror. Therefore—it is not a book for the squeamish. You have been warned!”
― Brian Lumley, The Compleat Crow

“it, exactly as in his dream. It was a very creepy”
― Brian Lumley, Necroscope

“Teach me how to ride your Möbius strip!”
― Brian Lumley, Necroscope

“Dragosani, I have seen a sister with her head cut off, with a stake through her breast and her eyes hanging on her cheeks, and I did not weep. No, but I pursued her slayers and skinned them and made them eat their skins. And I raped them with hot irons and before they could die soaked them in oil and put them to the torch”
― Brian Lumley, Necroscope

“McGowan’s turn to scowl. “Aye laddie, but Ah’m no English. And if wit was shit, ye’d have diarrhoea!”
― Brian Lumley, Necroscope: Resurgence: The Lost Years

“A vampire,” the other slowly answered, carefully formulating his thoughts, “is not human. I saw enough on the night Ferenczy died to convince me of that. So what is he? He is an alien creature, a cohabitant of man’s body and mind. He is at best symbiotic, a gestalt-creature, and at worst a parasite, a hideous lamprey.”
― Brian Lumley, Necroscope