Barry Lee Dejasu

“Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately.”
― Robert Aickman

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“We feel so superior to the dead.
For example, if Michelangelo was so damn smart, why'd he die?
How I feel reading the DSM is, I may be a fat stupid dummy, but I'm still alive.
The caseworker's still dead, and here's proof that everything she studied and believed in all her life
is already wrong. In the back of this edition of the DSM are the revisions from the last edition. Already, the rules have changed.
Here are the new definitions of what's acceptable, what's normal, what's sane.
Inhibited Male Orgasm is now Male Orgasmic Disorder.
What was Psychogenic Amnesia is now Dissociative Amnesia.
Dream Anxiety Disorder is now Nightmare Disorder.
Edition to edition, the symptoms change. Sane people are insane by a new standard. People who
used to be called insane are the picture of mental health.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor