“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.” MysteryLiteraryScholar QuotesMachen Book:The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales Source: The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales