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

“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

“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