Robert Dunbar Quotes & Sayings

The original Gothic horror tales focused on personalities deformed through loneliness. Ghouls, vampires, werewolves: all made, not born. But the isolation? Are even such as these ever truly alone? Perhaps the psyche has always been more complex than that, desire eternally more potent than terror. Surely, none prowl entirely in solitude. — Robert Dunbar

She twisted her body to the curtained windows, listening to the night. "Where are you, poor dead thing? Are you right outside?" The voice of the sea drifted on a low wind, like the noise a wolf might make in its sleep. — Robert Dunbar

Something deep in the human psyche has always seemed to yearn for ever more enhanced levels of savagery. — Robert Dunbar

We've got to call 911," she said.
"Are you sure that's such a good idea?" he asked. "Our friends are dead. There's probably drugs all over the place. You look like an alien, and we're from out of town. Plus what are we going to report exactly? Think about it. We both know what we saw."
"It was a roach, right?"
"I guess," he nodded. "The size of an SUV. — Robert Dunbar

The only thing worse than living inside an alligator had to be living inside a decrepit one. — Robert Dunbar

Abandoned houses seldom turn out to be as empty as they appear. Voices fade, but echoes linger, intimately, sinking from room to room. And sometimes figures emerge from those shadows, if only in dreams. What could be more profoundly idiosyncratic than our nightmares? Always, there has been something personal about ghost stories. How surprising is it that so many concern writers in torment? — Robert Dunbar

They were all so young and so aware of it. Youth comprised their sole asset, which each understood, and such knowledge excited them as much as it haunted them. — Robert Dunbar

Just as there are broken people, there are broken places on this earth. Some have always been broken. All cities have such neighborhoods at their edges, and this city is all edges ... block after block of bleakly hopeless outskirts.
People don't bury dead cities. They abandon them. They abandon them to the poorest of the poor, to the lost and the doomed. — Robert Dunbar

Especially on rainy nights like this, they would congregate under the bridge, all the boys from nowhere, the boys who lived nowhere, who had nowhere else to go. — Robert Dunbar

Here, rancid air hangs heavily in a void, its texture thick, liquid, clinging, in a night full of the hot smells of decay. — Robert Dunbar

Quiet is really just a lot of small noises that most people don't notice. — Robert Dunbar

They spring from deep within us, these nightmares, these folktales. They speak of our deepest needs, the ones we have all been taught since childhood never to put into words, because dreams reveal our other face, the one we keep hidden, the Hyde to mankind's collective Jekyll. — Robert Dunbar

Even in the wood, there was a right road and a wrong one. All the most terrifying fairy tales inevitably began with some foolish innocent (or two) straying from the path. Then anything might happen. — Robert Dunbar

Hope can be the cruelest thing. But it was all she had. — Robert Dunbar

Long before haunted houses existed, haunted woods circled the globe. Homer knew it. The Brothers Grimm knew it. In legend, all the great mythic quests of self-discovery begin with the hero entering a dark wood. Some journeys also end there. — Robert Dunbar

The unfortunate Elizabeth Bathori was said to bathe in the blood of young girls in order to preserve her youth and beauty. Apparently more than 600 maidens went down the drain before anyone noticed something amiss at the castle. How very inobservant the neighbors must have been. — Robert Dunbar

Never forget the gender of mother earth. This planet is a body through which arterial tides pulse and surge, and within this fluid murk stir serpents, inchoate monstrosities of the amniotic id. — Robert Dunbar

Even for an inbred clan deep in the swamp, she thought they might well be considered a peculiar bunch, but then the family always had run to eccentricity. — Robert Dunbar

What's the one thing so terrible that you've never told anyone? The one thing no one could ever forgive?" She stares hard into him. "The one thing no one could possibly know about and still love you? — Robert Dunbar

After all, the male ego was a horrible thing. — Robert Dunbar

Maybe a person had to lose everything to find purpose. — Robert Dunbar

It's not about slaying monsters," he told her. "Not these days. I think it's about learning to live with them. Anyway who says we're the good guys?" "I — Robert Dunbar

Blessed is the creature that knows its purpose. * — Robert Dunbar

Even the spate of clearly well-intentioned films about AIDS only added to the certainty that gay characters wind up dead by the final reel. After all, in the movies, no one lives with HIV ... perhaps the ultimate stigmatization. — Robert Dunbar

She wasn't all that into guys anyhow, she kept telling herself. It's just there were so goddamn many of them. — Robert Dunbar

They say a basis in fact underlies most legends. They say it all the time, all those Wise Elders in all those old horror films, the high priests, the scientists, the gypsy fortune tellers. On this single issue they agree unanimously. — Robert Dunbar

Sometimes sanity just means the ability to recognize the end of the road when you reach it. — Robert Dunbar

I see dull people," she yawned. — Robert Dunbar

Every hunchback has his gypsy, each phantom his diva, and flames of passion consume witches and martyrs alike. For any lonely monster, tradition demands that one sacrificial soul seek immolation.
Ashe to ashes.
It remains the ultimate, transformative act of love. — Robert Dunbar

Life was short and brutal; so were the neighbors. — Robert Dunbar

Something new prowled, something voracious and well-adapted to this environment. Something bad. Even the wood seemed to shiver with fear. And, no, trees do not make a sound when they fall in the forest with no one around to hear. But just before they fall, they scream. — Robert Dunbar