I don’t want my pain blanked out, he thought to himself; I need to keep my pain. It is a part of who I am, every bit as integral as the joy I’ve felt.

One senses that it is a region of cosmic antiquity, and that man is no more significant here than any other of the insects that crawl in the dust.

A pessimist is a liar, unless he destroys himself, and no less of a hypocrite than a priest who defiles the holy.

One may escape from the prisons of experience, ideology or philosophy, but it is impossible to escape from the reality of one's innermost self. Understanding this, I had freed myself from nostalgia, and having done so, what remained was to free myself from the prospect of the future.("The Tower")

I believe,' Muswell once said, 'that mental isolation is the essence of weird fiction. Isolation when confronted with disease, with madness, with horror and with death. These are the reverberations of the infinity that torments us.("The White Hands")