Our Lady of Darkness Quotes

“The “Howard” in the entry had to be Howard Phillips Lovecraft, that twentieth-century puritanic Poe from Providence, with his regrettable but undeniable loathing of the immigrant swarms he felt were threatening the traditions and monuments of his beloved New England and the whole Eastern seaboard. (And hadn’t Lovecraft done some ghost-writing for a man with a name like Castries? Caster? Carswell?)”
― Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness

“It was odd how old buildings had secret spaces in them that weren’t really hidden but were never noticed;”
― Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness

“And then he says that Thibaut always referred to Twin Peaks as Cleopatra’s Breasts.”
― Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness

“Whoever’d think, Mr. Wong, they could put nine hours and maybe ten of good, good darkness into such a tiny time-capsule, a gelatin spaceship bound for the stars.”
― Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness

“But it wasn’t to Gun I was giving the rectal Thorazine,” Saul amended. “—that would have been just too romantic—”
― Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness

“My Mrs. Willis thinks the skyscrapers are out to get her. At night they make themselves still skinnier, she says, and come sneaking down the streets after her.”
― Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness

“He moved to the nearest airshaft and looked down. Moonlight penetrated it as far as his floor, where the little window to the broom closet was open. Below that, it was very dimly lit from two of the bathroom windows — indirect light seeping from the living rooms of those apartments. He heard a sound of an animal snuffing, or was that his own heavy breathing reflected by the echoing sheet iron? And he fancied he saw (but it was very dim) something with rather too many limbs moving about, rapidly down and up.”
― Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness

“And the entire world was just as bad; it was perishing of pollution, drowning and suffocating in chemical and atomic poisons, detergents and insecticides, industrial effluvia, smog, the stench of sulfuric acid, the quantities of steel, cement, aluminum ever bright, eternal plastics, omnipresent paper, gas and electron floods - electro-mephitic city-stuff indeed!”
― Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness

“THE SOLITARY, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.”
― Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness