Fantasy Quotes

By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the river's edge and bear that temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad comes from his far realm on the twilight sea once a year in a golden palanquin to pray to the god of Oukranos, who sang to him in youth when he dwelt in a cottage by its banks. All of jasper is that temple, and covering an acre of ground with its walls and courts, its seven pinnacled towers, and its inner shrine where the river enters through hidden channels and the god sings softly in the night. Many times the moon hears strange music as it shines on those courts and terraces and pinnacles, but whether that music be the song of the god or the chant of the cryptical priests, none but the King of Ilek-Vad may say; for only he had entered the temple or seen the priests. Now, in the drowsiness of day, that carven and delicate fane was silent, and Carter heard only the murmur of the great stream and the hum of the birds and bees as he walked onward under the enchanted sun.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

It is our time, our task and our destiny - from Opoponax Dreams

~ Genieve Dawkins

You speak good words, child, but sometimes what lies within is much darker. The line between justice and revenge is then. Justice is order; revenge is chaos. If revenge is your innermost desire, you will be destroyed upon entering into the hall

~ Amira Aly

The rulers were using ancient knowledge to manipulate the amygdaloidal primal fear. They ruled through fear, preternatural fear created through soft, invisible waves designed to alternate the brain’s almond. They kept the people spellbound

~ Amira Aly

Been lickin’ peanut-butter spoons? Maybe I should call you butterfingers. It has a better ring than Hella Shella. - Tran'Answer my question, Tran. Right now. Or I show you just what these fingers'--I wiggled my fingers under his nose-- 'can really do.' I took a step closer, erasing the distance between us. 'And let me tell you, emo boy, you are not going to like it. Let’s just say, that peanut butter I ate, freshly made.' I licked my lips with care. 'I’m actually quite skilled when it comes to crushing nuts.' - Shella

~ Krista Alasti

The skeleton picked up the second skull, so worn as to barely be recognisable as such. The vertebrae fell and rolled like beads from a string.

~ J.a. Clement

Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again. 'May I presume to suggest,' yelled Shandy giddily to Davies, 'that we preoceed the hell out of here with all due haste.' Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. 'My dear fellow consider it done.

~ Tim Powers

People that are lazy don't get anything accomplished. It's People like me that are reliable.

~ Richard W. Todd

First of all, you're dead. Secondly, I cut off your head. Thirdly... yes, I know that rhymed, you really don't have to tell me.

~ Gayle Ramage

God, why do I bother trying to help you? It’s not like you appreciate it. It’s not like the word ‘thanks’ is in your vocabulary. It’s like you’re not capable of being nice to someone you decided to despise when you were six-years-old. Sure, about twelve years have passed, but what’s time compared to your rock-headed mind? - Tran

~ Krista Alasti

We've got an unbeatable team.- Sauron

~ Robert Lynn Asprin

Supernatural fiction contains its own generic borderland: a neutral territory, which Tzvetan Todorov calls 'the fantastic,' between 'the marvelous' and 'the uncanny.' According to Todorov, 'The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.' Once the event is satisfactorily explained (and sometimes it is never explained), we have left the fantastic for an adjacent genre - either 'the uncanny,' where the apparently supernatural is revealed as illusory, or 'the marvelous,' where the laws of ordinary reality must be revised to incorporate the supernatural. As long as uncertainty reigns, however, we are in the ambiguous realm of the fantastic.

~ Howard Kerr

The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality

~ Roger Caillois

Many of the best fantastic stories begin in a leisurely way, set in commonplace surroundings, with exact, meticulous descriptions of an ordinary background, much as in a 'realistic' tale. Then a gradual - or it may be sometimes a shockingly abrupt - change becomes apparent, and the reader begins to realize that what is being described is alien to the world he is accustomed to, that something strange has crept or leapt into it. This strangeness changes the world permanently and fundamentally.

~ Franz Rottensteiner

The fantastic postulates that there are forces in the outside world, and in our own natures, which we can neither know nor control, and these forces may even constitute the essence of our existence, beneath the comforting rational surface. The fantastic is, moreover, a product of human imagination, perhaps even an excess of imagination. It arises when laws thought to be absolute are transcended, in the borderland between life and death, the animate and the inanimate, the self and the world; it arises when the real turns into the unreal, and the solid presence into vision, dream or hallucination. The fantastic is the unexpected occurrence, the startling novelty which goes contrary to all our expectations of what is possible. The ego multiplies and splits, time and space are distorted.

~ Franz Rottensteiner

Imagination shrinks from the consequences.

~ Jude Morgan

In any event, whether a supernatural tale remains altogether fantastic or eventually modulates to the uncanny or the marvelous, the reader is faced with disconcerting ontological and perceptual problems.Indeed, the disorienting effect of the supernatural encounter in fiction seems to reflect some deeper disorientations in the culture at large.

~ Howard Kerr

It should be particularly stressed that the fantastic makes no sense in an out-and-out strange world. To imagine the fantastic in it is even impossible. In a world full of marvels the extraordinary loses its power.

~ Roger Caillois

Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it has often accompanied or predicted change, and served to shake up rational Complacency, challenging reason and reminding man of his darker nature. Its popularity has had its ups and downs, and it has always been the preserve of a small literary minority. As a natural challenger of classical values, it is rarely part of a culture's literary mainstream, expressing the spirit of the age; but it is an important dissenting voice, a reminder of the vast mysteries of existence, sometimes truly metaphysical in scope, but more often merely riddling.

~ Franz Rottensteiner

(Washington) Irving was only the first of the writers of the American ghostly tale to recognize that the supernatural, exactly because its epistemological status is so difficult to determine, challenged the writer to invent a commensurately sophisticated narrative technique.

~ Howard Kerr

But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighted in leading readers into, but not out of, the haunted dusk of the borderland.

~ Howard Kerr

I searched my mind for the right visualization. I knew it had to start with what I put in my head. That is where all my accomplishments are formed.

~ Tina M. Randolph

The fantastic in literature doesn't exist as a challenge to what is probable, but only there where it can be increased to a challenge of reason itself: the fantastic in literature consists, when all has been said, essentially in showing the world as opaque, as inaccessible to reason on principle. This happens when Piranesi in his imagined prisons depicts a world peopled by other beings than those for which it was created. (On the Fantastic in Literature)

~ Lars Gustafsson

It was all I could do to keep from lunging across the table and pressing my shuttering lips against his burning flesh. My palms were sweating profusely causing me to have to wipe them against my jeans under the table. Those last few seconds had felt like a lifetime in pause.

~ Jennifer L. Brown

The crimson leaf that blew past looked the twin of the one she'd picked up in the palace courtyard: a bloodied hand.

~ S.m. Jonas

As Ariel recounted the events of her dream, two magnificent, batlike wings grew from the backs of her shoulders, stretched as if preparing to fly, then retreated back into their host. The sound heard when the wings disappear is the giggling of Alanna, who watched the event much the same way I did, in rapt wonder.

~ Don A. Martinez

People with imagination

~ Arthur Levine

One man carries salvation and damnation from the desert.

~ Matthew Sawyer

While his brain lay slowly dying, Bevan felt his body come back to life.

~ Stephanie Bedwell-Grime

Here's a thought. You answer what I ask and I keep not killing you. - Antiope Flint - DREAMNASIUM

~ Geoffrey Thorne

When she stopped kissing him his hand went to her waist to pull her back. the sun beat down on us. The day quivered. The sky was as deep as the ocean. We breathed underwater.

~ Karen Foxlee

The strangest experiences in life are apt to lose their effect if dwelt upon long enough. (Furze Hollow)

~ A.m. Burrage

Hoga Gothyelk no longer felt anger, not truly -- only varieties of sorrow.

~ R. Scott Bakker

The fantastic is in complicity with the realist model, in the claims that realism makes to represent the true face of reality. It points to the gaps and inadequacies of realism, but does not question the legitimacy of its claims to represent reality. The concept of “suspension of disbelief', that beloved criterion of positivist criticism supposedly serving to establish the legitimacy of the fantastic, confirms this hegemony.

~ Michael Richardson

I believe there is an explanation for everything - although we shall never know the explanation for everything. Not everything in this world can be understood by us, nor should it be. It is not necessary.

~ Steve Augarde

Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It's so much like home, and then it holds out on you.

~ Gregory Maguire

One becomes sated with platitudes no less than honey, so that one often breaks another's bones in one's vexation.

~ Jack Vance

Refusing what Adorno called that 'comfort in the uncomfortable' taken by the fantastic, surrealism seeks to reintegrate man into the universe.

~ Michael Richardson

The first time I watched him fight, I got hard. My heart pounded in my chest, and I chewed on my lip until it bled. I vowed then I would make him mine.

~ Kasia Bacon

Violence always leads to pain Trendal Malian- Ishtaria: Prince of Blades

~ Keith Collier