Mark McLaughlin · 220 pages
Rating: (35 votes)
“That book is filthy. Wicked. Dangerous. Yet it feels so comforting to own it.”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“No, that watch doubles as a high-power flame-thrower and a bidet.”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“THE SLITHERING QUIVER OF THE RIVER LIZARD'S TWISTED LIVER-BLISTERS In the city of Phlemuria, three miles west of Ulthar in the Elder Dreamlands, folks had a saying: the god of Fate is no more than a capricious old pig-herder made cranky by an embarrassing rash.”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“THAT IS NOT DEAD WHICH CAN ETERNAL LIE /AND WITH STRANGE AEONS, EVEN DEATH MAY LIVE AND LET DIE”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“Reginald’s furnishings, I noted, were solid oak. Oak! Now there was a wood you could trust. I noticed something odd about his bookcase—something that caused a small but sharp bell of warning to ring in my mind. Most of the volumes on its shelves were quite old, and bound in rotting human skin. Finally I noticed the thing that had set off my inner alarm: the bookends were mismatched. One was a human skull and the other was a kitschy little plastic owl. Certainly plastic has no place in the decor of a gentleman’s study.”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“My hands shivered like twin albino bats in an Antarctic ice-cave, assuming such caves served as lodging for such bats. I’m not really sure. They’d have to be pretty hardy bats. What would they eat?”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“1. Dark Lord of the Screaming Abyss 2. Protector of the Night-Gaunts 3. Messenger of the Crypt Gods 4. Vile Master of the Blood-Soaked Torments 5. Father of the Black Scorpions 6. Uncle of the Flesh-Eating Hawks 7. Second-Cousin of the Accursed Pharaoh with Pubic Dandruff 8. Niles Lathotep 9. The Killjoy of Kadath 10. Discount Abdul, the Persian Carpet King—Half-Off This Week Only 11. Keeper of the Sacred Camel-Toes 12. He Who Doth Swing Both Ways in Darkness 13. Minty Belasco 14. Big Jake”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“What’s that you say, girl? A foamy-mouthed kitty bit your ass and now you’ve gone mondo batshit?”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“The thing looked like an especially unsavory cross between a mangy hound-dog, a Tasmanian devil, and a scruffy, drug-addled, middle-aged British rock star.”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“I happened to run into Anton at the Arkham Public Library just a few days later. I was walking down a shadowy hallway when he came bustling out of the Forbidden, Unspeakably Dangerous, Never-To-Be-Checked-Out-By-Anyone Section with a notepad in his hand”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“I only hope you are never tempted to venture into the library’s Forbidden, Unspeakably Dangerous, Never-To-Be-Checked-Out-By-Anyone Section to peruse our secret copy of that most shocking and insanity-inducing of ancient tomes, typeset at a point-size convenient to those with impaired vision—the Large-Print Necronomicon!”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“If what’s behind that door is so terrible, shouldn’t we carry a machete or two? A kitchen knife? An especially sturdy cocktail umbrella?” “There is no weapon on Earth one could wield against such terror!” he moaned. “Oh, I see. Then we should just go in unarmed. Well, fine. Lead the way.”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“And at 10:23 p.m. Central Time, a cornfield in Buttercup, Iowa split open and It emerged: that selfsame deity that the Pre-Atlantean, Post-Lemurian Serpent Priests addressed by Seven-Thousand-and-Twelve Sacred Names (Number Eleven translating to “Whatever It Is, We Wish It Would Just Leave Us Alone”); that lugubrious critter known to the ancient Aztecs as He-Who-Drips-Sweat-All-Over-Our-Nice-Clean-Temple, to whom they sacrificed the lymph nodes of their enemies after they’d given the hearts to gods they actually liked.”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“Miss Tuppenceworth, W.’s pretty blonde secretary, looked out the window of her office, which served as antechamber to her superior’s sanctum sanctorum. “Why is it that whenever H.P. shows up, the sky is suddenly filled with multi-colored silhouettes of shapely women flying about? One can see outlines of guns among the female forms, and hear music filled with saxophones and trumpets. And there’s this sort of swirly gun-barrel shifting to and fro…Decidedly odd.”
― Mark McLaughlin, quote from Best Little Witch-House in Arkham
“He remembered enthusiasm, hope, and a kind of jubilation or exultation. Cheerfulness, yes, and joviality, and the brief gratification of sex. Gladness, too, fullness of heart, appreciation, and many other emotions. But not joy. No, that belonged to simpler minds.”
― Evan S. Connell, quote from Mrs. Bridge
“Imagine this: Take your problems, all of them, from the tiniest, annoying concerns to the most horrific, difficult challenges, and put all those problems into a brown paper bag. Then imagine if everyone else in the world took all their problems and put them into their own paper bags. Think of how many bags there would be, all piled up into one gigantic mountain of brown paper. If you were told you could pick any bag of problems and take it home with you, do you think you'd want someone else's problems? I don't think so. You'd be scampering like crazy to find your own bag in that mountain of brown paper.”
― quote from The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew--Three Women Search for Understanding
“We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:
deliverance
What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature
still it happens
sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed
dryness of mouth
after panting
there are books that describe all this
and they are useless”
― Adrienne Rich, quote from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984
“From quite early on, I had this idea of compartmentalized identities - 'this is how you are when you are with your mum, and this is how you are when you are with your dad' - so it seemed like I could never absolutely be myself. And the image of myself as compromised and inconsistent made me want to withdraw from the world even further. I had a sense of formulating a paper-mache version of myself to send out in the world, while I sat controlling it remotely from some smug suburban barracks.”
― Russell Brand, quote from My Booky Wook
“An unreadable response was heaps better than an unprintable one.”
― Courtney Milan, quote from Proof by Seduction
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