Alyssa Macpherson > Alyssa's Quotes

“To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest..”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

“I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?"
Death thought about it.
CATS, he said eventually. CATS ARE NICE.”
― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Where have you been?" she cried. "Damn you, where have you been?" She took a few steps toward Schmendrick, but she was looking beyond him, at the unicorn.

When she tried to get by, the magician stood in her way. "You don't talk like that," he told her, still uncertain that Molly had recognized the unicorn. "Don't you know how to behave, woman? You don't curtsy, either."

But Molly pushed him aside and went up to the unicorn, scolding her as though she were a strayed milk cow. "Where have you been?" Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn's old dark eyes that looked down.

"I am here now," she said at last.

Molly laughed with her lips flat. "And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where where you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?" With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. "I wish you had never come. Why did you come now?" The tears began to slide down the sides of her nose.

The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, "She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world."

"She would be." Molly sniffed. "It would be the last unicorn in the world to come to Molly Grue." She reached up then to lay her hand on the unicorn's cheek; but both of them flinched a little, and the touch came to rest on on the swift, shivering place under the jaw. Molly said, "It's all right. I forgive you.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“Even the littlest minds, sunk in petty pride of self, are susceptible to chords struck on the cosmic scale.”
― Michael Shea, Demiurge: The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales of Michael Shea

“many aficionados now seek originals of his powerful studies of the alien, which depict distorted colossi striding across mist-enshrouded jungles or peering round the dripping stones of some druidic circle.”
― Brian M. Sammons, The Children of Gla'aki: A Tribute to Ramsey Campbell's Great Old One

“Just finished my new painting. It shows these houses, with the lake in the foreground, and the bloated body of a drowned man at the edge of the water—Relentless Plague, I think. I hope they like it.”
― Brian M. Sammons, The Children of Gla'aki: A Tribute to Ramsey Campbell's Great Old One

“if you look closely enough you might find me in my place among the trees.”
― Brian M. Sammons, The Children of Gla'aki: A Tribute to Ramsey Campbell's Great Old One

“You are All, and you can feel yourself dying, giving forth an endless moan of pain and despair that is the true song of existence, a discordant symphony of glorious hopelessness, of absolute and utter futility. The universe was born to die. It has no other purpose, and knowing this, being this, is truly the ultimate drug.”
― Robert S. Wilson, Ashes and Entropy

“The only thing that carried a pulse in that apartment was an uncomfortably large print in the living room – a painting of a smiling girl-gymnast with silk angel wings, arms outstretched on a balance beam, rainbow colors bleeding off her and then melting into a dark expanse. I guess it was supposed to be inspirational – Through Me All Things Are Possible, it said in flamingo pink script – but the glow in the girl, the pitch-blackness of her eyes, gave me vertigo. Like looking down through a bridge of glass onto the Milky Way.”
― Robert S. Wilson, Ashes and Entropy

“Because unless you’re actively bleeding, and sometimes even then, you’ve probably got something more to give.”
― Robert S. Wilson, Ashes and Entropy

“I realized what it was about her that seemed so different now: her skin was barely thick enough to contain a human soul. And underneath she was all flesh, no blood. Pulseless meat on a butcher’s block. One of those preserved cadavers propped up in a science exhibit, calf muscles forever engaged, a display of the naked wonder of the human body at full gallop.”
― Robert S. Wilson, Ashes and Entropy

“Because once you can’t level up – once you fail yourself – once you let your weakness win – what good are you? What worth do you have?”
― Robert S. Wilson, Ashes and Entropy

“My grandfather, a small but fat man who resembles a walking roly-poly, may or may not accompany her. He doesn’t recall that he died many years ago.  I remind him sometimes, at which points he sits down in an old easy chair in the living room and stares at the hutch where his television used to be.”
― Robert S. Wilson, Ashes and Entropy

“To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.”
― Albert Camus

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.”
― Albert Camus

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Orcs only know one language. Blood. I'm the fucking alphabet.”
― Kurtis J. Wiebe, Rat Queens, Vol. 1: Sass & Sorcery

“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

“The shortest horror story:

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”
― Frederic Brown

“Horror is the removal of masks.”
― Robert Bloch

“Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“There was a time when people accepted magical experiences as natural. There were no priests then, and no one went chasing after the secrets of the occult.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods,

‘And for the tender mother
Who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses
His baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens
Who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus
That wrought the deed of shame?

‘Hew down the bridge, Sir Consul,
With all the speed ye may;
I, with two more to help me,
Will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand
May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand,
And keep the bridge with me?

Then out spake Spurius Lartius;
A Ramnian proud was he:
‘Lo, I will stand at thy right hand,
And keep the bridge with thee.’
And out spake strong Herminius;
Of Titian blood was he:
‘I will abide on thy left side,
And keep the bridge with thee.’

‘Horatius,’ quoth the Consul,
‘As thou sayest, so let it be.’
And straight against that great array
Forth went the dauntless Three.
For Romans in Rome’s quarrel
Spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life,
In the brave days of old.

Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.

Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than a foe,
And the Tribunes beard the high,
And the Fathers grind the low.
As we wax hot in faction,
In battle we wax cold:
Wherefore men fight not as they fought
In the brave days of old.”
― Thomas Babington Macaulay, Horatius