A Quote to Ponder While I Search for Something to Write About

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"Wait! There, I feel once again that I shall really express myself, shall bring the words to bay. Alas, no one taught me this kind of chase, and the ancient inborn art of writing is long since forgotten -- forgotten are the days when it needed no schooling, but ignited and blazed like a forest fire -- today it seems just as incredible as the music that once used to be extracted from a monstrous pianoforte, music that would nimbly ripple or suddenly hack the world into great, gleaming blocks -- I myself picture all this so clearly, but you are not I, and therein lies the irreparable calamity. Not knowing how to write, but sensing with my criminal intuition how words are combined, what one must do for a commonplace word to come alive and to share its neighbor's sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in its neighbor and renewing the neighboring word in the process, so that the whole line is live iridescence; while I sense the nature of this kind of word propinquity, I am nevertheless unable to achieve it, yet that is what is indispensable to me for my task, a task of not now and not here. Not here!"

- Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading

Faces of Horror

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear -- the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.

H. P. Lovecraft
"Pickman's Model"


Since most of my free time over the next few days will be taken up with the actual reading of stories and novel(s) in preparation for October, until the 1st I'll be putting up this series of pictures of, and quotes from, the kind of writers I'll be talking about for the next month(!).

Affinity #2

This is an affinity based on two novels and one short story. But they've made their mark on me, and, while this post is technically a further example of padding, it will help lead to something I'm going to post more about this weekend.

"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

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"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

-Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

The Saddest Paragraph I've Ever Read

If you've never read the novel, at this point, very early in the story, Esther Summerson is a young girl being raised by a very unpleasant godmother. Esther never knew her parents, and has only known unhappiness. She blames this state entirely on herself. Her only comfort is her doll, named Dolly.

"I went up to my room, and crept to bed, and laid my doll's cheek against mine wet with tears, and holding that solitary friend upon my bosom, cried myself to sleep. Imperfect as my understanding of my sorrow was, I knew that I had brought no joy at any time to anybody's heart and that I was to no one upon earth what Dolly was to me."

-Charles Dickens
Bleak House

I mean, for Christ's sake, Dickens. Tear my heart out, why don't you?