William Scott Home > Quotes

“I put a sour cherry pastille on my tongue, but the combination jarred. A meaty, protein taste was called for. With a cool skin, sticky sweet fragrance in the nostrils, the aleatory drip of timeless water echoing in your ears, a limbo beyond the muscle spindles... you become a spiced mummy in a cool chamber beneath the Nile. This salt-surfeited breeze tingling every corpuscle of my skin set me adrift on a cool back eddy near a basser sea... but the wave lap and sibilance of the palm leaves was like the rustle of a costly veil... in what exotic world did a vortex of primary colours drain into the eyes?... did it all make me a taffeted plankter drinking substance from the spectrum of a fractured sun?"

-"Cancerous Kisses of Crocodiles”
― William Scott Home

“A quarter-moon smeared a feverish glow on the marble slabs and dappled the trodden weeds that beleaguered them with a pale dewy leprosy; only the massy shadows which clustered around the trunks of the ancient oaks and beeches escaped its infection.”
― William Scott Home, Hollow Faces, Merciless Moons

“Become desert, the great silty gobs
Rise up in whirlwinds and subsist under miasma
Of sediments aloft: dust-storms inherit
The powerful cells of the old gorals:
The vacated seabed's stark unfinished frame
Roils with lightnings and thunders down to the trenches

Which despite centuries keep filling in
With an oily ooze pressed from corpse Sargassos
In a chain of trapdoor--bottom Dead Seas
By mile-deep muds laid down as secret essence
Of all the ingenuities fielded above.
In them the newest become most ancient mires.

Profound air clubs like a meteor-hammer
The misfits weaned more in shallows, but the bones,
The kraken carapaces, litter both
Guys-slope and plain, can yon and domdaniel
Rearing like cere brat ranges from the chat
Of midge-mollusks uncountable, minor life..”
― William Scott Home, Stain of Moonlight