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21 " Something deep in the human psyche has always seemed to yearn for ever more enhanced levels of savagery. "
― Robert Dunbar , Vortex
22 " 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. "
23 " 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 , Martyrs and Monsters
24 " Hope can be the cruelest thing. But it was all she had. "
― Robert Dunbar , The Streets (The Pines Trilogy, #3)
25 " 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. "
26 " It takes courage to look up. Courage just to want something, "
27 " 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. "
28 " 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 , Dark Forest
29 " 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. "
30 " They imbibed. It never went far, not among so many, but their naturally frantic edge amplified it, whatever the euphoric, pushed it until giddiness mutated into a sort of epiphany – a pack ritual. And rituals have power. "
31 " 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 , The Shore (The Pines Trilogy, #2)
32 " Blessed is the creature that knows its purpose. "
― Robert Dunbar , Wood
33 " 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. "
34 " Maybe a person had to lose everything to find purpose. "
35 " 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 , The Pines (The Pines Trilogy, #1)
36 " 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? "
37 " 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. "
38 " In occult terms, a man’s path was viewed as a spiritual road, leading ever upward. Manifest destiny of the rational soul: he ascended. But woman? A lesser species, primitive and bound to the savage earth by umbilical cycles, her road spiraled downward, and any man who strayed onto her path might become lost. It was her function after all – the function of her debased and debasing nature – to tempt him away from salvation. The girl can’t help it. Here, have an apple. "
39 " Dawn seems frozen – out of time – full of promise and wretched with finality. Like every dawn. "