Maeve

“What makes a nightmare nightmarish is the sense that something is happening that should not be. While nightmares are the most convenient reference point for this sense of the impossible, the unthinkable, as something that is actually happening, it is not restricted to our sleeping hours.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

“The human phenomenon is but the sum
Of densely coiled layers of illusion
Each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity
That there are persons of any kind
When all there can be is mindless mirrors
Laughing and screaming as they parade about
in an endless dream
”
― Thomas Ligotti

“As she draws level the flickering light strikes her. But under closer scrutiny she is not the young firefox that I presumed she was. With that posture, that chin held so high, those cold beautiful eyes, that tight tapering skirt and those feet mounted on pedestals with heels like blades, how could I have been so wrong? Her hair is not blonde, but white. The dead white of the pantomime wig. That haughty catwalk face is actually more like a skull too, with aged parchment stretched across it; a dry surface freshly painted with a palette more suited to the circus clown than the city girl.”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors

“Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.”
― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers