Robert Dunbar > Quotes

“I see dull people,” she yawned.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“Quiet is really just a lot of small noises that most people don’t notice.”
― Robert Dunbar, Willy

“The original Gothic horror tales focused on personalities deformed through loneliness. Ghouls, vampires, werewolves: all made, not born. But the isolation? Are even such as these ever truly alone? Perhaps the psyche has always been more complex than that, desire eternally more potent than terror. Surely, none prowl entirely in solitude.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“Every hunchback has his gypsy, each phantom his diva, and flames of passion consume witches and martyrs alike. For any lonely monster, tradition demands that one sacrificial soul seek immolation. Ashes to ashes. It remains the ultimate, transformative act of love.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“Cinema – all art really – has great power. Power to illuminate. Power to transform. For those of us who experience film as literature, classic movies comprised an introductory education in the genre. As kids, many of us went searching through library shelves for obscure source novels after seeing some old movie or other. It was the start of many an adventure.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“The only thing worse than living inside an alligator had to be living inside a decrepit one.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“Life was short and brutal; so were the neighbors.”
― Robert Dunbar, Wood

“Just as there are broken people, there are broken places on this earth. Some have always been broken. All cities have such neighborhoods at their edges, and this city is all edges … block after block of bleakly hopeless outskirts. People don’t bury dead cities. They abandon them. They abandon them to the poorest of the poor, to the lost and the doomed.”
― Robert Dunbar, The Streets

“Abandoned houses seldom turn out to be as empty as they appear. Voices fade, but echoes linger, intimately, sinking from room to room. And sometimes figures emerge from those shadows, if only in dreams. What could be more profoundly idiosyncratic than our nightmares? Always, there has been something personal about ghost stories. How surprising is it that so many concern writers in torment?”
― Robert Dunbar, Shadows: Supernatural Tales by Masters of Modern Literature

“Take a deep breath and read. It'll calm you.”
― Robert Dunbar

“Something deep in the human psyche has always seemed to yearn for ever more enhanced levels of savagery.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“Hope can be the cruelest thing. But it was all she had.”
― Robert Dunbar, The Streets

“What’s the one thing so terrible that you’ve never told anyone? The one thing no one could ever forgive?” She stares hard into him. “The one thing no one could possibly know about and still love you?”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“Sometimes sanity just means the ability to recognize the end of the road when you reach it.”
― Robert Dunbar, The Streets

“Even in the wood, there was a right road and a wrong one. All the most terrifying fairy tales inevitably began with some foolish innocent (or two) straying from the path. Then anything might happen.”
― Robert Dunbar, Dark Forest

“They spring from deep within us, these nightmares, these folktales. They speak of our deepest needs, the ones we have all been taught since childhood never to put into words, because dreams reveal our other face, the one we keep hidden, the Hyde to mankind’s collective Jekyll.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“They say a basis in fact underlies most legends. They say it all the time, all those Wise Elders in all those old horror films, the high priests, the scientists, the gypsy fortune tellers. On this single issue they agree unanimously.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“After all, the male ego was a horrible thing.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“We’ve got to call 911,” she said.
“Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” he asked. “Our friends are dead. There’s probably drugs all over the place. You look like an alien, and we’re from out of town. Plus what are we going to report exactly? Think about it. We both know what we saw.”
“It was a roach, right?”
“I guess,” he nodded. “The size of an SUV.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“She wasn’t all that into guys anyhow, she kept telling herself. It’s just there were so goddamn many of them.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“No one dreamed them up. No one needed to. The vampire clawing at the window, the werewolf prowling the moor, the hags at the crossroads – they lurked here already. Some nightmares are ancient, as old as civilization. Some are older still.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“They were all so young and so aware of it. Youth comprised their sole asset, which each understood, and such knowledge excited them as much as it haunted them.”
― Robert Dunbar, The Streets

“Long before haunted houses existed, haunted woods circled the globe. Homer knew it. The Brothers Grimm knew it. In legend, all the great mythic quests of self-discovery begin with the hero entering a dark wood. Some journeys also end there.”
― Robert Dunbar, Dark Forest

“The unfortunate Elizabeth Bathori was said to bathe in the blood of young girls in order to preserve her youth and beauty. Apparently more than 600 maidens went down the drain before anyone noticed something amiss at the castle. How very inobservant the neighbors must have been.”
― Robert Dunbar, Vortex

“Even for an inbred clan deep in the swamp, she thought they might well be considered a peculiar bunch, but then the family always had run to eccentricity.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“It takes courage to look up. Courage just to want something,”
― Robert Dunbar, The Streets

“They imbibed. It never went far, not among so many, but their naturally frantic edge amplified it, whatever the euphoric, pushed it until giddiness mutated into a sort of epiphany – a pack ritual. And rituals have power.”
― Robert Dunbar, The Streets

“It’s not about slaying monsters,” he told her. “Not these days. I think it’s about learning to live with them. Anyway who says we’re the good guys?”
― Robert Dunbar, Wood

“…a bar he sometimes sneaked into called The Slab. (They served bloody marys and zombies – stiff drinks they called them – and the jukebox only played dirges. A spotlight pinned dead go-go boys in cages, and though he’d never ventured to the refrigerated back room, he’d heard stories.)”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“She twisted her body to the curtained windows, listening to the night. “Where are you, poor dead thing? Are you right outside?” The voice of the sea drifted on a low wind, like the noise a wolf might make in its sleep.”
― Robert Dunbar, The Shore