Michael Joseph Schumann > Michael's Quotes

“Sign this... and I'll show you”
― A.J. Hartley, Chasing Shadows

“Sometimes heroism goes unnoticed.”
― Tom DeLonge, Chasing Shadows

“People think they want to know everything these days. But they don’t. They really don’t. So”
― Tom DeLonge, Chasing Shadows

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

“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

“The price of meat has just gone up and your old lady has just gone down.”
― Frank Zappa

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book

“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

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“If rules make a framework for the mind to climb about in, why should the mind not climb right out?”
― Mike Ashley, The Mammoth Book of Black Magic

“Those that can, do; those that can’t, teach; and those that can’t teach, administrate.”
― Mike Ashley, The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction

“How and why sub-quark wave events are captured and read, how they let us view the past, and why they show us only possible pasts, is difficult to explain. So instead of a technical lecture, I’m going to engage in what popular science journalists call “oversimplification”. In academia, we call this “lying”.”
― Mike Ashley, The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction

“And now it's your turn.
You're the only one left, and I know you're here, somewhere. Maybe you're in the back of one of the closets, whimpering a prayer that I won't find you. Maybe you've holed up in some secret hiding place you've known about since childhood and are damning me to hell, hoping I'll grow tired of this game we're playing and just leave you alone.
This IS a big house. But I am very thorough.
You've been very patient as I've gone around blocking the doors and wedging the windows shut. I didn't hear a peep out of you, even though you must have known that each scrape of wood, each rattle of metal meant another escape route closed off. Maybe you've accepted that there is NO escape.”
― Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Bloody Mary and Other Tales for a Dark Night

“At the time no one really knew for sure that John Cropsey was more than the stuff of campfire stories. Not the townspeople, who saw their businesses wither and die with the bad publicity he brought. Not even the survivors of of his onslaught against Camp Beechwood. The only people who were certain that Cropsey was more than just the figment of a vivid imagination were the ones who would never share their secret knowledge: his victems.”
― Stefan Dziemianowicz

“Her tenacity resembles nothing so much as a decapitated gila monster whose severed head still clings to the victim it has bitten. - (Our Late Visitor)”
― Marvin Kaye, 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories

“If magic violates the fundamental laws of nature, they clearly weren't all that fundamental.”
― Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide

“The bottom of the sea was aflame with a vast bloody glow that spread beneath the schooner; the light slid under the keel and illuminated the sails and rigging from below. It was as though we were on a boat in the Drury Lane Theatre, lighted by an invisible row of flares.

‘Phosphorescence?’ I ventured.

‘Look,’ whispered Jellewyn.

The water had become as transparent as glass. At an enormous depth, we saw great dark masses with unreal shapes: there were manors with immense towers, gigantic domes, horribly straight streets lined with frenzied houses. We appeared to be flying over a furiously busy city at an incredible height.

‘There seems to be movement,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

We could see a swarming crowd of amorphous beings engaged in some sort of feverish and infernal activity.

‘Get back!’ Jellewyn shouted, pulling me violently by the belt.

One of those beings was rising toward us with astounding speed. In less than a second its immense bulk had hidden the undersea city from us; it was as though a flood of ink had instantaneously spread around us.

The keel received a tremendous blow. In the crimson light, we saw three enormous tentacles, three times as high as the mainmast, hideously writhing in the air. A formidable face composed of black shadows and two eyes of liquid amber rose above the port side of the ship and gave us a terrifying look.”
― Jean Ray, Ghouls in My Grave

“Forgetting... is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself... For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was & there was only ever a butterfly.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Do you not enslave people now?” asks the man. “Chains are forged of many strange metals. Poverty is one. Fear, another. Ritual and custom are yet more. All actions are forms of slavery, methods of forcing people to do what they deeply wish not to do.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades

“Let me go--I'm not wanted--let me take away what's left of me--”
― Oliver Onions, The Beckoning Fair One

“...there was no second attempt. Fate has no Morrow.”
― Oliver Onions, The Beckoning Fair One

“I grinned. "I'm anybody's for a cuppa and a biscuit.”
― David Stuart Davies, A Taste for Blood

“looked”
― David Stuart Davies, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Veiled Detective

“Life is made up of many comings and goings and for everything that we take with us,we must leave something behind”
― Herman Raucher, Summer of '42

“His teeth were now rattling on hers: knock-knock, who's there? Bicuspids. Bicuspids who? Bicuspids McAllister. And then his tongue came flicking out, looking for an opening, any opening, even a missing tooth. But she had no missing teeth and all the teeth she did have were clenched together as in a snapped bear trap.”
― Herman Raucher, Ode to Billy Joe

“She became aware of his hands, moving up both sides of her, sliding up from her waist to her rib cage. Bad news. Instinctively she knew that it was "either-or." Either she opened her mouth and let the mad tongue in--or he was going to, sure as God made little apples, grab her little apples. The choice, she knew, was hers--for he lingered there, simultaneously, in both areas of combat, as if to say, "You have five seconds, take your pick.”
― Herman Raucher

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success