Robert Ervin Howard

“ It seems to me, especially in the autumn, that that one vagrant Danish strain that is mine, predominates above all my Celtic blood. It is in the autumn that the wanderlust grips me, and my sleeping dreams are not of the lazy palm fringed lagoons, the desert caravans, the loud bazaars and the tropic jungles to which my waking thoughts turn, but of cold blue seas beneath a clear and frosty sky, of clean sandy fens stretching from the cold foam to blue mountains, of boats racing through the flying spray, and fishers' nets, shining like silver on the shore. ”

“ Sure I live in the dust of the past and my dreams are seldom of present or future, but I am ever treading roads of the dim ages and strange are some of the figures whom I meet and strange the shapes who stare at me. ”

“ Witches and werewolves, alchemists and necromancers, haunted the brains of those strange savage people, barbaric children that they were, and the only thing which was never believed was the truth. Those sons of the old pagan tribes were wrought upon by priest and monk, and they brought all their demons from their mythology and accepted all the demons of the new creed also, turning their old gods into devils. ”

“ This tale I wove about a mythical antediluvian empire, a contemporary of Atlantis.
I wish I had money—I'd take several courses in anthropology and the various phases of antiquity, and spend the rest of my life exploring ruins in out-of-the-way corners of the globe. The guture of the race interests me little; the present but a little more; the past, greatly. An occultist of my acquaintance, who has gone deeper in the matter than any man I ever knew, says I have a very ancient soul, am a reincarnated Atlantean, in fact! ”

“ I find tales of the East extremely fascinating, and am beginning to believe that the old, old theory of Turkish-Gaelic affinity is well bourne out. The races have so much in common cruelty, treachery, loyalty, fatalism, spend-thriftness, beserk fighting rage, a love of music and poetry. ”