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1 " 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 , Vortex
2 " Cinema – all art really – has great power. Power to illuminate. Power to transform. For those of us who experience film as literature, classic movies comprised an introductory education in the genre. As kids, many of us went searching through library shelves for obscure source novels after seeing some old movie or other. It was the start of many an adventure. "
3 " Sometimes sanity just means the ability to recognize the end of the road when you reach it. "
― Robert Dunbar , The Streets (The Pines Trilogy, #3)
4 " 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. "
5 " 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. "
6 " No one dreamed them up. No one needed to. The vampire clawing at the window, the werewolf prowling the moor, the hags at the crossroads – they lurked here already. Some nightmares are ancient, as old as civilization. Some are older still. "
7 " 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 , Martyrs and Monsters
8 " 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 , Dark Forest
9 " …a bar he sometimes sneaked into called The Slab. (They served bloody marys and zombies – stiff drinks they called them – and the jukebox only played dirges. A spotlight pinned dead go-go boys in cages, and though he’d never ventured to the refrigerated back room, he’d heard stories.) "
10 " 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. Ashes to ashes. It remains the ultimate, transformative act of love. "
11 " After all, the male ego was a horrible thing. "
12 " 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. "
13 " Take a deep breath and read. It'll calm you. "
― Robert Dunbar
14 " I see dull people,” she yawned. "
15 " Quiet is really just a lot of small noises that most people don’t notice. "
― Robert Dunbar , Willy
16 " The only thing worse than living inside an alligator had to be living inside a decrepit one. "
17 " 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 , Shadows: Supernatural Tales by Masters of Modern Literature
18 " 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. "
19 " Life was short and brutal; so were the neighbors. "
― Robert Dunbar , Wood
20 " She wasn’t all that into guys anyhow, she kept telling herself. It’s just there were so goddamn many of them. "
