Gothic Quotes

And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself.But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed roles...

~ Simona Panova

Gray.The overcast skies had the colour of deadened stones, and seemed closer than usually, as though they were phlegmatically observing my every movement with their apathetic emptily blue-less eyes; each tiny drop of hazy rain drifting around resembled transparent molten steel, the pavement looked like it was about to burst into disconsolate tears, even the air itself was gray, so ultimate and ubiquitous that colour was everywhere around me.Gray...

~ Simona Panova

I was recently living more comfortably surrounded by secrets... Like dozens of luxurious satiny pillows, they were embracing me from all directions into safe lulling warmth, thus isolating me from the sharp dead-cold edges of the truth hiding behind their endearingly smooth textures and tender soothing colours.Secrets could be so irresistibly beautiful...

~ Simona Panova

The utter unbroken silence was more appalling than any ominous noise, than the loudest yells of anguish, than the most piercing screaming...Dead silence.Literally dead.

~ Simona Panova

I was beginning to agree with the thesis that some truths were better off dead.And buried.

~ Simona Panova

His character would be blamed, loathed, discussed, and adored – but somewhere there, behind his mask of a hero, Cardew would remain faceless.Anonymous.

~ Simona Panova

The desperate piercing scream of horror echoed far above the sharpened tops of the trees wrapped in thin obsidian-transparent mist, and I startled jerkily, tripping again, and almost collapsed onto the cold moist ground.

~ Simona Panova

I lie more convincingly than I tell the truth.

~ Simona Panova

My dear lady, you have no idea just how scandalous I can be. ~Peter Viktor von Strassenberg, 1905

~ Gwenn Wright

And Mother, I love her dearly, but she flies into a panic whenever I mention women’s rights. As she sees it, it will be so much more difficult to marry me off if I am not only of a weak constitution but of a progressive mind as well.

~ Gwenn Wright

I came from across the ocean and through the wilderness and landed here and found you hiding behind a tapestry. My fate was sealed at the sight of your stockinged feet.~Viktor von Strassenberg

~ Gwenn Wright

This is not written for the young or the light of heart, not for the tranquil species of men whose souls are content with the simple pleasures of family, church, or profession. Rather, I write to those beings like myself whose existence is compounded by a lurid intermingling of the dark and thelight; who can judge rationally and think with reason, yet who feel too keenly and churn with too great a passion; who have an incessant longing for happiness and yet areshadowed by a deep and persistent melancholy—those who grasp gratification where they may, but find no lasting comfort for the soul.

~ B.e. Scully

There is absolutely nothing monstrous about being a vampire. In fact, it's quite beautiful.

~ Rae Hachton

And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into recesses if his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Never give up, Never surrender!!!!!If you think you can't, then you must, if you must, then you can..Tony Robbins

~ Paula V. Hardin

I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Then the wind came in with Bart and blew the vase of roses from the table. I stood and stared down at the crystal pieces and the petals scattered about. Why was the wind always trying to tell me something? Something I didn't want to hear!

~ V.c. Andrews

There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.

~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

It was so close to October that Halloween was knocking at his heart.

~ Barry Eysman

They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.

~ Susan Hill

Walk with this tomorrow night. If nothing happens, thendon’t come back. Forget about us, this place, but if you feel theNightwalker in you awaken, then return to where you belong.Return to me, and the streets will run red with blood.

~ Keith Kekic

These streets belong to us because we decided not to punch the time clock. We decided to see what and f*ck is going on out here when all those other people are going to sleep. So we walk from dusk until dawn and we rule.

~ Keith Kekic

There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

If on thoughts of death we are fed,Thus, a coffin, became my bed.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

I have learned one lesson in all this and I will share it knowing it will do no one any good. The lesson is this: There are none more complicit in one's undoing than one's own heart.

~ James Pratt

Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation…our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys

~ Leslie Fielder

This apartment, which you no doubt profanely suppose to be the shop of Will Wimble the undertaker --a man whom we know not, and whose plebeian appellation has never before this night thwarted our royal ears --this apartment, I say, is the Dais-Chamber of our Palace, devoted to the councils of our kingdom, and to other sacred and lofty purposes.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Ha!’ cackled the fiend, ‘I expect you’d like revenge on that husband of yours. Murder shouldn’t go unpunished, and no creature enjoys delivering chastisement as much as I. What about giving him a taste of his own medicine? If you’d be so kind as to lend me your body, I’ll set him dancing to my tune.’The wife’s spectre grimaced and nodded, at which the wicked Likho stripped off the nightgown, then the dead woman’s pliant skin, peeling back the flaccid folds. These it left in a slack heap. It gobbled her flesh and sucked the bones clean. These it hid behind the stove, before inserting itself inside the empty, wrinkled carcass, taking the former position of the corpse. Its fat tongue swiped the last juices from around its lips.When the husband returned home, all was as it had been; there was not a speck of blood to be seen, although the strangest smell of rotten eggs lingered

~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

Inside, there was a bed, and upon the bed there was a woman. More beautiful was she even than the damask rose while her scent, drifting through the open window, was that of the night dew. Her hair was silken as the raven's wing. Quite naked, she lay, so still upon the bed, her eyes closed in reverie.The young man looked first upon her breasts, where her hand rested. And upon each breast, there was a rosebud nipple. Upon each nipple there was a tip most tender. Upon each tip there was a milky drop. Chin lifted, lips parted, she milked her maiden breast.'What I would give to suckle at that teat,' thought he. from 'Against Faithlessness' in Cautionary Tales

~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

Good and evil exist in all of us. a moment’s temptation takes us on a wrong path. On that path may lurk foul fiends,inhuman, yet feeding, needingall our weaknesses: vanity, indolence and envy,Easy fruits for evil appetites,our flesh, a tasty afterthought,our bones flung asunder.

~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

Listen,listen with your eyes,and your lips.Listen with your skin, and your blood.Can you hear us,at the edges?

~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

Here, at the edges,Whispering to you,And we’re not alone; not aloneHere, in the dark.We are behind the door, in the corners,In the room where you’ve just extinguished the light.We flicker in the shadow you cast on the wall.We are the prickle on the back of your neck.Curled, in words unspoken,We are the shiver on your uneasy flesh,The creep of the unknown on your skin.Can you feel us?Here, at the edges.From the Foreword of Cautionary Tales - by Emmanuelle de Maupassant

~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

Crook your finger, they’ll come closer. Pull the covers tighter to your chin, in beside you they’ll creep.

~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

There is love in me the likes of which you've never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied int he one, I will indulge the other.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

I shall challenge all authority. Question all who claim dominion over me. I am not a thoughtless being but a man with his own beliefs.

~ Grandaddy Bad

All she could see was her demise and it called out a tempting ruse, offering a suffering less potent than what sickened the living.

~ B.b. Wynter

I'm not here to change the world, just your perception of it.

~ Grandaddy Bad

Laying here in my grave..at last.. I am finally alone.

~ Grandaddy Bad

Insects crawled across my skin, legs skittering across my flesh, numbed paths of cold left in their wake. They were the creatures that heralded my ghosts, and I knew them well, yet the revulsion they caused in those moments far exceeded anything I’d felt before.

~ Hazel Butler