Home > Author > Mark Samuels
1 " 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. "
― Mark Samuels , Glyphotech
2 " A pessimist is a liar, unless he destroys himself, and no less of a hypocrite than a priest who defiles the holy. "
― Mark Samuels , The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales
3 " 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. "
4 " I had long ago determined that I would devote my life to literary scholarship. Not, let me emphasise, the dry-as-dust scholarship of academe, the crushing orthodoxy to be found in universities, but rather the recondite scholarship that is a journey into the unknown. I refer, chiefly, to those dead authors whose works savour of the uncanny and the marvellous, authors whose unique perspectives are beyond the self-stultifying purview of the modern critical mania for so-called realism. For my part I chose the mysteries, and the hierophant of mystery was an obscure author called Arthur Machen. "
5 " You are simply a dream... and I am tired of dreaming. "
― Mark Samuels , The White Hands and Other Weird Tales
6 " When I was a kid, growing up during the 1970s, I used to read a lot of horror and science fiction. I graduated from comic books to paperbacks around the time I first entered my teens. And I want to say that what 99% of that stuff tells you about supposed encounters with the unknown is a formulaic convention. No one faints like a chicken-shit or else reaches for their weapon like Arnie Schwarzenegger in the face of something so utterly terrifying there isn’t even a name for it. What those writers don’t know is what happens in an encounter with the outside is this: that the moment slows down to such an extent that time itself simply stands still in your head. I suppose that fact doesn’t make for good characterisation. It’s incommunicable. I think they call it the numinous.I once did a semester in creative writing back after graduating, around the decade King was outselling every other author on the planet, but could never make the grade. Still, I read a lot of the best attempts. Maybe that’s why someone like Lovecraft, or Machen, or one of the old-school writers of that stuff I used to read had almost pulled it off. They were no good at characterisation and tended to use ciphers, presenting the phenomenon itself as the main protagonist, because it was the way things are when you encounter it. The thing empties you, draining out any semblance of normalcy, no matter what your history is, or what you think you’re all about. Real horror consists not of the worst thing in the world you can imagine happening, but in encountering some abomination you cannot possibly imagine, something even worse than fear: a shard of absolute outsideness. Human characters become shadows, just shadows. "
― Mark Samuels , The Prozess Manifestations
7 " He attempted to distract his thoughts from the events that were overwhelming him by going over his papers. These were the sum total of his literary output over the last fifteen years. In the early days he had harbored an inflated idea as to the merit of his work and had even enjoyed publication in magazines that nobody read. It was only later that he discovered he preferred to write for himself alone and not for the dubious pleasure of seeing his strange works in print. He liked to dream over them, writing only when inspiration came to him, which was infrequently, and the half-formed pieces and the false starts were either destroyed or subsumed into longer writings—of which there were few. He enjoyed destroying the work that did not satisfy him. Sometimes he even wondered if he actually wrote just so he could obliterate the results. "
― Mark Samuels , Black Altars
8 " For, in truth, is not all human philosophy simply the piling up of one word after another in a self-absorbed train of thought and justification? "
9 " The European dream was dead, he thought, the Europe of grand ideals was buried in the ashes of apathy. There was no brotherhood of nations, only the squalid struggle of the political and financial masters to line their own pockets, while the masses were brainwashed into a zombie-like existence under the false flag of liberty. All its values were secular and materialistic—with propagandistic jargon employed to nullify citizens from detecting the corrosion of their souls. Once Europe had professed itself to be the embodiment of a spiritual ideal. But, like a fossil, all that remained of it now was its hollow shell, the insides having rotted away during the passage of centuries. "
10 " Look around you,” the stranger said. “Can’t you see that we are living amongst the ruins of our civilisation?”The words seemed to chime in with the deliberations already in Egremont’s mind, and he thought again of the disillusionment he felt over his own time spent in the corridors of power in the European Union. What good had come out of the project? A series of once great cities Americanised out of all recognition, streets thronged with homogenised consumerist outlets, a gulf between cultural and historical identity, blatant social engineering, obscenely wealthy masters of state and private enterprises, a celebrity-obsessed media, intellectual debates reduced to sound bites, a collective attention span that diminished year on year, aged people with plastic faces worshipping youth and an intelligentsia committed only to the self-destructive cause of fashionable cynicism. "
