W.H. Pugmire > Quotes

“She stood with her back to the antique upright mirror where her image, silhouetted by the slight slice of moonlight that filtered through thin curtains, was a nebulous blur.  She brought a smell with her, like that of upturned old earth, and he breathed deeply as he sat up in bed and drank her strange allure. ”
― W.H. Pugmire, Encounters with Enoch Coffin

“Enoch considered the defiance in the painted eyes and the subtle perversion expressed with curling lips, and then he touched a pair of frozen lips as if the smiling portrait might whisper some secret word into his hand. ”
― W.H. Pugmire, Encounters with Enoch Coffin

“Ashman had caught sight of a large unframed canvas leaning against a wall, and stumbled toward it to bend down and take a closer look. His expression twisted with confusion, then disgust. “It’s perverse, your obsession with capturing ugliness so beautifully.”
― W.H. Pugmire, Encounters with Enoch Coffin

“As further proof of your perversity, in the painting of my dear wife I commissioned – yes, I introduced you to her myself, didn’t I? – in that painting you made the beautiful Shoshana appear ugly, haunted, close to madness.” “I painted what I saw in her.” “It was a mirror she couldn’t handle. Do you know she slashed your canvas to ribbons before she slashed her own flesh?”
― W.H. Pugmire, Encounters with Enoch Coffin

“The building was certainly innocuous in appearance, with its clean cream-colored wood and small-paned windows, its balconies and widow’s walk.  It looked a perfectly peaceful habitation from the outside, and it wasn’t until one walked into the house that its sinister aspects became discernible.  One passed the threshold and walked into a dark domain, a place that breathed of the past with its antique furnishings, its old oak paneling, its dead silence. ”
― W.H. Pugmire, Encounters with Enoch Coffin

“He liked to imagine that he would have preferred to have lived in an earlier era, a time when, perhaps, life would not have been so complicated for a fellow such as himself. He had often felt a loner in the modern world, which was one reason he loved books, that world into which he could escape neoteric time. He felt, here in this entrance way to the building, that he had stepped into an earlier epoch, away from the dull prevailing age.”
― W.H. Pugmire, An Ecstasy of Fear

“We are the children of the valley. Borne of its magick, we must at some time return to its substance.”
― W.H. Pugmire, Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror

“Dykes, kikes, spics, micks, fags, drags, gooks, spooks . . . more of us are outsiders than aren’t; and that’s what the dear young ones too often fail to understand. They think they’ve learned it all by age fifteen. Perhaps they have. But they’re not the only ones who’ve learned it.”
― W.H. Pugmire, An Imp of Aether

“[...] my imagination isn’t cosmic — it’s supernatural. Where my fiction aligns with HPL’s [Lovecraft's] is in my obsession to write Literature, to create literary art, to write beautifully. In themes, we are very different. My fiction is emotional, his is intellectual. Most of his characters flee from the horrors; mine ARE the horrors, or long to be so.”
― W.H. Pugmire, Gathered Dust and Others

“That cannot die which stands outside time.”
― W.H. Pugmire, The Strange Dark One: Tales of Nyarlathotep

“They call to you with dreaming, from their sunken cities or their pits of cosmic void. They drink your lunacies and fears.”
― W.H. Pugmire, An Ecstasy of Fear

“I knew from the lingering shadows in his eyes that he had been to that site where diseased shadow crept into his pulsing heart and altered his sanity.”
― W.H. Pugmire, Gathered Dust and Others

“She rose to him, through daemonic darkness, and the splintered lips of her chiseled countenance curled with sardonic ecstasy as, pressed to living flesh, they claimed the poet with their kiss.”
― W.H. Pugmire, Some Unknown Gulf of Night

“Brother of mine, tainted by my adoration, your breath is cosmic mistral that speaks the poison of Baudelaire, and I imbibe the alchemy. My star-brimmed eyes leak tears for you, beautiful and lonesome eidolon, my phantom-double; creature of desire and dismay.”
― W.H. Pugmire, An Ecstasy of Fear