Horror Quotes

Automatically, like all healthy, normal beings, I deny the existence of horror...

~ Leland Hall

Bodies lay in the sun. Bodies stood in the sun.

~ N.j. Hallard

It ain't the blows we're dealt that matter, but the ones we survive.

~ Stephen King

It was no ape, neither was it a man. It was some shambling horror spawned in the mysterious, nameless jungles of the south, where strange life teemed in the reeking rot without the dominance of man, and drums thundered in temples that had never known the tread of a human foot.

~ Robert E. Howard

The room was plainly but adequately furnished; she noted the shower stall in the bathroom beyond. Actually, she would have preferred a tub, but this would do.

~ Robert Bloch

The loneliest place to spend eternity is your own life after you can't change it anymore.--Lucifer from Kevin

~ Bruce Jenvey

When she had died, his anchor was gone and the world had burned from his untethered insanity.

~ Cedric Nye

Rockwood didn't have a movie theater or an IHOP or a strip mall. But it did have two churches, a ramshackle bar, and last (but certainly not least) Wacky Willie's Deluxe Goofy Golf, a barren landscape of wilted ferns and plastic flamingos with peeling paint. Wacky Willie had added the 'Deluxe' when finally ridding the thirteenth hole windmill of a stubborn family of bats after a great and terrible struggle that would forever be known as 'The Fearsome Bat War of Rockwood County' by Willie, but was usually referred to as 'That Time Willie Had to Get Rabies Shots' by everyone else.

~ A. Lee Martinez

...Don't be surprised, and I say it darkly, do not be surprised if you lose your Luke in this cause; perhaps Mrs. Dudley has not yet had her own mid morning snack, and she is perfectly capable of a filet de Luke á la meuniére, or perhaps dieppoise, depending upon her mood; if I do not return -and he shook his finger warningly under the doctor's nose- I entreat you to regard your lunch with the gravest suspicion. Bowing extravagantly, as befitted one off to slay a giant, he closed the door behind him.

~ Shirley Jackson

Snow came back, but she didn't come back right.

~ Rob E. Boley

He wanted to roar like a lion on a cement floor. And bellow like a polar bear with yellow fur worn down to pink skin against the tiles of an enclosure in a zoo. The disgust must come. Let it drip down the walls. Scorch the ceiling black with hatred. Liberate rage.

~ Adam Nevill

I thought it was foolish mumbo jumbo when I was alive - then I woke up dead.

~ C.v. Hunt

Either way, it happened, and everyone was going to pretend that it didn't.

~ C.v. Hunt

When you love to kill and can do it as well as I can, then what better way to raise hell? -Javier Bones Jones

~ Justin Bienvenue

They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn't like to look at them. They were the walking dead.

~ Stephen King

Life's a bitch and then you keep on fucking living.

~ Will Elliott

One should let one's nails grow for a fortnight. O, how sweet it is to drag brutally from his bed a child with no hair on his upper lip and with wide open eyes, make as if to touch his forehead gently with one's hand and run one's fingers through his beautiful hair. Then suddenly, when he is least expecting it, to dig one's long nails into his soft breast, making sure, though, that one does not kill him; for if he died, one would not later be able to contemplate his agonies. Then one drinks his blood as one licks his wounds; and during this time, which ought to last for eternity, the child weeps.

~ Comte De Lautréamont

I have seen an evil thing this night,' he said; 'I have seen how the dead drink the blood of the living. And the blood is the life.

~ Francis Marion Crawford

The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal Nature bade me weep no more.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

I'll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into - something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

In one picture, the pool was half hidden by a fringe of mace- weeds, and the dead willow was leaning across it at a prone, despondent angle, as if mysteriously arrested in its fall towards the stagnant waters. Beyond, the alders seemed to strain away from the pool, exposing their knotted roots as if in eternal effort. In the other drawing, the pool formed the main portion of the foreground, with the skeleton tree looming drearily at one side. At the water's farther end, the cat-tails seemed to wave and whisper among themselves in a dying wind; and the steeply barring slope of pine at the meadow's terminus was indicated as a wall of gloomy green that closed in the picture, leaving only a pale of autumnal sky at the top. (Genius Loci)

~ Clark Ashton Smith

Terrible and ancient and scarred with the endless cold of space, the terrible and ancient things glistened with frozen moisture and colors played across the surface of the skin, colors that were never meant to be seen on earth.

~ Simon Kurt Unsworth

Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Your cunning has proved to be that of Cain. I grant you power over the Hellmouth. May Samael take my revenge. The thing said with a bitter look and a voice that seemed to be many.

~ Georgina Morales

Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick? And she had tittered nervously and replied, When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when you slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things. And he had said, I don't mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books. And she hadn't known what to say. (Smoke Ghost)

~ Fritz Leiber

Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care.

~ T.e.d. Klein

The snow wasn't deep - in many places its crust was firm enough that they actually walked on top of it - but the wind was surgical, a precision instrument with needles for teeth, and it found even the tiniest exposed places on her skin, attacking them.

~ Joe Schreiber

Middling monsters died at the point of pitchforks, burned with torches, or at the butt of silver-capped canes wielded by angry, geriatric Poles. Middling people were dime-a-dozen, emptied souls, shorn sheeple, human husks. A good monster didn’t worry about what it was doing; it just did it. A true predator didn’t worry about guilt, or being popular, or anything. It just cruised along, living for the kill, surviving. A good person, well, she’d put a bullet in her head or weigh her feet down and throw herself into the Chicago River, holding her breath until she went to the sludgy, filthy bottom, and had to open wide and breathe water until she died.

~ D.t. Neal

Richard felt about as conspicuous as a foreskin at a Jewish nudist camp.

~ Dylan J. Morgan

Did I never tell you Sassicaia makes me horny?

~ Steve Emmett

Another big mistake you women make, never underestimate the cunning of a killer

~ Mia Moore

(W.D.) Howells asserted that the Americans' 'love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry.' Their fiction, he added, often gathers in the gray 'twilight of the reason,' on 'the borderland between experience and illusion. Howells's geographical metaphor was derived, of course, from Hawthorne's idea of a moonlit 'neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.' Whether literally, as in Cooper's The Spy, or metaphorically, as in Hawthorne's works, the neutral territory/borderland was the familiar setting of the American romance. As American writers came to realize, not only was there a borderland between East and West, civilization and wilderness, but also between the here and the hereafter, between conscious and unconscious, 'experience and illusion' - psychic frontiers on the edge of territories both enticing and terrifying.

~ Howard Kerr

Beware, William of Mercia, you heeded not our warnings and you can no longer turn back, but the path ahead is strewn with danger, to you, and to those who travel with you. This is but the beginning. The legions of the underworld await you, armies will seek to destroy you, but only you can know the true course.

~ K.j. Wignall

Mademoiselle De Lafontaine – in right of her father, who was a German, assumed to be psychological, metaphysical and something of a mystic – now declared that when the moon shone with a light so intense it was well known that it indicated a special spiritual activity. The effect of the full moon in such a state of brilliancy was manifold. It acted on dreams, it acted on lunacy, it acted on nervous people; it had marvelous physical influences connected with life. Mademoiselle related that here cousin, who was mate of a merchant ship, having taken a nap on deck on such a night, lying on his back, with his face full in the light of the moon, had wakened, after a dream of an old woman clawing him by the cheek, with his features horribly drawn to one side; and his countenance had never quite recovered its equilibrium.

~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

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

I discovered news of old horrors in old books; read intelligence of old atrocities in old periodicals; always in the back of my mind, every day a bit louder, I heard the seashell drone of some growing, coalescing force; I seemed to smell the bitter ozone aroma of lightings-to-come.

~ Stephen King

The only constant in this reality is change...

~ Brian Fatah Steele

There's a queer streak in human natures. Men come back to places for secret reasons, for feelings they cannot resist.'More than men come back,” I said.

~ Leland Hall

Evil is nothing more than that, which was once divine, and has fallen into shit. Indrid Night - Through A Glass Darkly.

~ Donald Allen Kirch

I turn away and stare through the window at the field where the scotch broom creeps yellow as hell toward my doorstep. Six years and it has advanced from the hinterlands to the picket fence in the back yard. Six more years and it will have chewed this house to the foundation, braided my bones in its hair.

~ Laird Barron