writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize various such phenomena. Fort's books sold well and are still in print today.
Charles Hoy Fort was born in 1874 in Albany, New York
, of Dutch
ancestry. He had two younger brothers, Clarence and Raymond. His grocer father was something of an authoritarian: Many Parts, Fort's unpublished autobiography, relates several instances of harsh treatment – including physical abuse
– by his father.
A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them — or they'll march.
It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damed; that salvation only precedes perdition.
Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.
But Truth is that besides which there is nothing: nothing to modify it, nothing to question it, nothing to form an exception: the all-inclusive, the complete — By Truth, I mean the Universal.
The outrageous is the reasonable, if introduced politely.
The fittest survive. What is meant by the fittest? Not the strongest; not the cleverest — Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive. There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does survive. "Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival." Darwinism: That survivors survive.
The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open.
Existence is Appetite: the gnaw of being; the one attempt of all things to assimilate to some higher attempt.