Mike Finn

“She nursed a second beer while she tried not to race through the last three chapters of The Lens and the Dapplegrim. Brand was a blur beyond her vision, and the noise piled up against the walls, leaving her alone in the center of a perfect sphere of story. Each word tumbled into the next, a rockslide of prose that would end in a dramatic confrontation between Investigator Beckett and the deliciously devious Aramy, with Leena’s life in the balance. At least that’s where she expected things to go. The book had a way of confounding her expectations, and every time it did, she experienced a thrill of delight.”
― Travis Baldree, Bookshops & Bonedust

“No one left alive in Basic today could verify the window's origin though. Like all myths, this one became history the moment enough people chose to believe it.”
― Giano Cromley, American Mythology

“There hadn’t been a god for many years. Not the nightgownclad patriarch of Sunday school coloring books; not the sensitive young man with the inevitable auburn ringlets Anna had stared through in the stained-glass windows at Mass; not the many-armed and many-faceted deities of the Bhagavad Gita that she’d worshipped alongside hashish and Dustin Hoffman in her college days. Even the short but gratifying parade of earth goddesses that had taken her to their ample bosoms in her early thirties had gone, though she remembered them with more kindness than the rest.

God was dead. Let Him rest in peace. Now, finally, the earth was hers with no taint of Heaven.”
― Nevada Barr, Track of the Cat

“No Human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House