Horror Quotes

Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.

~ Henry James

Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station.

~ Thomas Ligotti

I think horror, when done well, is one of the most direct and honest ways to get to the core of the human experience because terror reduces all of us to our most authentic forms.

~ Alistair Cross

If the town were a black hole, I was the helpless star being sucked into oblivion. It was an oblivion I craved.

~ J.d. Stroube

These fools who haven't the slightest idea how to live the morals they espouse. These fools who proclaim themselves men of God, yet show not the slightest reverance to His word...Is it any different from a drunkard preaching temperance? A whore preaching modesty?

~ Seth Grahame-Smith

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its content. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into peace and safety of a new dark age.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

All in all, he thought it was a bad idea to get involved with the woman investigating his ex's possible suicide with intent to haunt.

~ Marybeth Niederkorn

It isn't every day an ex decides to haunt us.

~ Marybeth Niederkorn

Which is the true nightmare, the horrific dream that you have in your sleep or the dissatisfied reality that awaits you when you awake?

~ Justin Alcala

We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.

~ Arthur Machen

To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.

~ Eugene B. Sledge

The shortest horror story:The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.

~ Frederic Brown

Ms. Fang is the nicest, sweetest teacher at Scary School. She only ate twelve kids last year.

~ Derek The Ghost

I’m the sexiest of them all! - Carol

~ Matthew Leeth

Science, the agent that once promised to eradicate the supernatural, had, through the nuclear threat, resurrected it. Magic was not exactly alive, but it was surely undead.

~ Jim Trombetta

It illuminated a vision Dante could not have imagined in his wildest nightmares, nor Poe in the grasp of an uncontrollable delirium.

~ Alan Dean Foster

Sulphurous wind gusted in his wake the dust of the street swirled and the folds of his black coat flapped against his thin body.

~ A.f. Stewart

Patches don’t look it, but when attached to your soul they can get pretty heavy. They go over the holes in your soul, like when you patch a sock. When you have a hole in your soul, it’s because you’re hurting from something. I don’t know if you noticed, but that girl had a lot of holes.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

The shadow self is what lies beneath the makeup. It’s those ugly parts that you haven’t accepted about yourself. You hide those parts in the shadows until you’re ready.” Her face remained a haunting calm. “When you realize the scars are who you are, that there was nothing wrong with you and that you were beautiful all along - that’s when you decide to take the makeup off.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Because I am, just as you are you. We don’t always get to pick who we are, Shelly Wynn, but we can choose to celebrate it.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

There’s nothing wrong with you at all. Sometimes people say or do things that are mean because there's something the matter with them. With Lydia, it seems there’s always something wrong with her.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

I’m afraid they’re not coming.” Abby said fearfully. “Our parents, our teachers – everyone! They’ve disappeared. That’s it. Lights out, Shelly. We’re on our own.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

It’s no big deal. It’s kind of like a tattoo. It won’t hurt, not too much, just a few stitches and it’ll be all over. It’s really interesting how it’s done. You won’t believe where your soul hides. Go on, take a guess. Where do you think it is?

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Aloha Oukou. It looked like your soul was escaping so I put you in a tree.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

She could spin it between her legs, skip with it, twirl it around her neck and transfer it from one arm to the other. Shelly hooped because she enjoyed it; it calmed her whenever she would have an argument or a bad day at school, and it also allowed her to think. Today, she needed to hoop more than ever.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Somehow her hula hoop had cut into the driver’s side door like the vehicle was made of cheese.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Soon, all the children were chanting it. “No school! No school!

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Shelly shook her head and made sure she had plenty of space so that she wouldn’t hit anything. As many times before, she kept the hoop close to her waist and then twirled it with small, tight bursts of speed. As the hoop gathered in momentum it started to give off a hum that soon took on a light blue illumination far brighter than the streetlamps. It was so bright, that it lit up the entire backyard.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...

~ Stephen King

Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.

~ Stephen King

Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.

~ Bram Stoker

I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.

~ Mark Lawrence

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.And then the nightmares will begin.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.

~ Jean Lorrain

That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall.

~ H.g. Wells

This guy sounds like all the bad guys from the last ten years of murder movies all rolled into one. Like he might be the worst of those books you have there. If he was real, and really like that, then I should arrest him, right?” Matthew asked, hoping he could show the boy that he would protect him, and he could tell him the truth now.“No, Deputy. Because he is real, and he is really like that, and you should run.

~ Dennis Sharpe

Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.

~ Truman Capote

I had lied to myself from the very beginning, deceived myself into believing that I was being fanciful and overly imaginative. Surely such monstrosities only existed in nightmares? Yet I had lived through a nightmare these past months, and that was no dream at all.       I was still fighting against the awful truth, not wanting to give in, searching my mind for a logical explanation—but there was none. And the most horrible realization of all was that I had known, somewhere deep inside, ever since the day I first set eyes on Vladec Salei.       Plague carrier.       Living death.       Drainer of life.       The phrasing did not matter. No euphemism could strike fear into the hearts of men the way that single word

~ Melika Dannese Lux