c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
When you have too much faith in something, it's bound to hurt you. Too much faith in anything will suck you dry. In this way, all the world is a vampire.
— Poppy Z. Brite
What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.
— David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It
That sure as fuck ain't no cow
— Scott Sigler
Walking out in the middle of a funeral would be, of course, bad form. So attempting to walk out on one's own was beyond the pale.
— Steve Hockensmith, Dawn of the Dreadfuls
Good luck is just bad luck with its hair combed.
— Stephen King
The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess
—  but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.
Horror is the removal of masks.
— Robert Bloch
I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.
— Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (“The Medusa”)
— Thomas Ligotti
It's poor judgment', said Grandpa 'to call anything by a name. We don't know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can't heave them into categories with labels and say they'll act one way or another. That'd be silly. They're people. People who do things. Yes, that's the way to put it. People who *do* things.
— Ray Bradbury, The October Country
We ask only to be reassuredAbout the noises in the cellarAnd the window that should not have been open
— T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion
You wouldn't think that people would believe that we all got so incredibly beat up—in so many interesting ways—from a bear attack. Especially not when Carmel is sporting a bite mark that is a spot-on match for wounds found at one of the most horrifying crime scenes in recent history. But I never fail to be surprised by what people will believe.
— Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood
Melody exploded. "THIS ISN'T LIKE GETTING A FISH TO SEE IF I COULD BE RESPONSIBLE ENOUGH FOR A PUPPY!" She took a deep breath, calmed herself and lowered her voice. She then repeated the statement as if doing so removed the stink of the outburst."I'm well aware of that," said Lonnie. "And not to poke it with a stick, but you don't see any puppies sniffing around that empty fish bowl, do you?
— B.M.B. Johnson, Melody Jackson v. the Woman in White
I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
Stare at him," said Ghost. "They won't bite you if you keep staring at them."Steve backed away. "They bite?"Not really. They hiss at you, mostly. The only time geese are ever dangerous is when you happen to be standing on the edge of a cliff. I heard about a guy that almost got killed that way."By geese?"Yeah, there was a whole flock of them coming after him. All hissing and cackling and stabbing at his ankles with their big ol' beaks. He didn't know you had to stare them right in the eye, and he panicked. They backed him right over a fifty-foot cliff."So how come he didn't die?"This guy had wings," said Ghost. "He flew away.
— Poppy Z. Brite, Lost Souls
It wasn’t that she necessarily wanted to “socialize” at the bonfire, but she wanted to broadcast to the general population that her antisocial behavior was a personal choice not a sentence to social leprosy.
— J.D. Stroube, Caged in Darkness
Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness. Even winter — the hardest season, the most implacable — dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.
— Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart
To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair
— Edgar Allan Poe
The things a man sees when he ain't got a gun.--Watson the Caretaker
— Stephen King
Very well, but remember this... I'll be looking at you when you're laid on the cross and the twelve blows are crashing down on your limbs. When the crowd is finally tired of your screams and wandered home, I will climb up through your blood and sit beside you. I will look deep into your eyes... and drop by drop I will trickle my disgust into them like burning acid until... finally... you perish.
— Patrick Süskind
Err:510
— Stephenie Meyer, Twilight
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
— John Updike
Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.
— Guy de Maupassant
this is the best year ever because i am reading the chronicles of vladimir tod
— Heather Brewer
A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling .... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and [yet] with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.
— Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
On the morning of the exorcism, I stayed home from school.
— Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts
Horror itself is a bit of a bullied genre, the antagonist being literary snobbery and public misconception. And I think good horror tackles our darkest fears, whatever they may be. It takes us into the minds of the victims, explores the threats, disseminates fear, studies how it changes us. It pulls back the curtain on the ugly underbelly of society, tears away the masks the monsters wear out in the world, shows us the potential truth of the human condition. Horror is truth, unflinching and honest. Not everybody wants to see that, but good horror ensures that it's there to be seen.
— Kealan Patrick Burke
The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.
— H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters III: 1929-1931
The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
O little one, My little one, Come with me, Your life is done. Forget the future, Forget the past. Life is over: Breathe your last.
— Clive Barker, Abarat
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
I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.
— H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
All things are true. God's an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live." - Peloquin
— Clive Barker
Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.
— Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man's.
— John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
Death's gruesome face taunts:soulless eyes, crimson grimace.I really hate clowns.
— Katherine Applegate
And she arose from her deathbed in a gossamer gown, with eyes the color of starlight and hair as black as the night. And those who were her captors trembled, for the scent of death and madness emanated from her soul, and yet she was not dead. She moved like the spiders that creep in the treetops, and none could look away. Taking her first captor in hand, she fed deep and ravenous. And so it was that Myst, Queen of the Indigo Court, was born from the blood of the dead.
— Yasmine Galenorn, Night Myst
Sometimes the hardest journeys are the ones that begin with little hope. But we need to take them anyway.
— Richard Finney, Demon Days: Angel of Light
We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form.
— Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan
I could hear the chaotic laughter trailing behind me. It turned the ageless trees into a menace. They loomed around me, while hiding him. The branches tore at my skin in an effort to bind me, while weeds sought to shackle my ankles, so that I could go no further. The pain they caused was minor, when I compared it to the searing inferno at my core.
— J.D. Stroube, Caged in Darkness
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, Chloe of the Night
Death was a living creature. Death was a man tormented by his past. Death was once a human.
— S.K.N. Hammerstone
Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.
— Joe Hill
The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by the commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hysterical laughter... the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever.
— Fritz Leiber
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
— Stanley Kubrick
Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?
— E.T.A. Hoffmann
The result is ... that there's no room left in the world for the weird – though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it.
— Fritz Leiber, Heroes and Horrors
There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Thing on the Doorstep
Within its gates I heard the soundOf winds in cypress caverns caughtOf huddling tress that moaned, and soughtTo whisper what their roots had found.(“A Dream of Fear”)
— George Sterling, The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror
I would die rather than live without you. I would die the same way he died. I can't bear you to look at me the way you did. I cannot bear it if you do not love me!" -Claudia.
— Anne Rice
Wha...what are you smiling for...? If I'd swallowed that needle, I'd have died! It's not like putting tabasco in ohagi!!!
— Ryukishi07, Higurashi When They Cry: Curse Killing Arc, Vol. 2
To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.
— Peter Straub, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
I think that true horror is accomplished by slowly getting into your brain. The old way is much more scary.
— Sergio Aragonés
I said, 'If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn't we meet them a long time ago?
— Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques
There will never be slaves in Britain,' Godalming continued, 'but those who stay warm will naturally serve us, as the excellent Bessie has just served me. Have a care, lest you wind up the equivalent of some damned regimental water-bearer.'In India, I knew a water-bearer who was a better man than most.
— Kim Newman, Anno Dracula
Shit rolls downhill. Bureaucracy rolls faster.
— David Wellington
Lo!" cried the demon. "I am here! What dost thou seek of me? Why dost thou disturb my repose? Smite me no more with that dread rod!" He looked at Cabal. "Where's your dread rod?""I left it at home," replied Cabal. "Didn't think I really needed it.""You can't summon me without a dread rod!" said Lucifuge, appalled."You're here, aren't you?""Well, yes, but under false pretences. You haven't got a goatskin or two vervain crowns or two candles of virgin wax made by a virgin girl and duly blessed. Have you got the stone called Ematille?""I don't even know what Ematille is."Neither did the demon. He dropped the subject and moved on. "Four nails from the coffin of a dead child?""Don't be fatuous.""Half a bottle of brandy?""I don't drink brandy.""It's not for you.""I have a hip flask," said Cabal, and threw it to him. The demon caught it and took a dram."Cheers," said Lucifuge, and threw it back. They regarded each other for a long moment. "This really is a shambles," the demon added finally. "What did you summon me for, anyway?
— Jonathan L. Howard, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer
You've faced horrors in these past weeks... I don't know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.
— Tasha Alexander, A Fatal Waltz
I wanted to curl up into a fetal position and start sucking my thumb, let my tears and dripping saliva pool under me. Sorry. I tried living, tried being sentient. Can't do it. Can't live in the same universe with that.
— David Wong, John Dies at the End
I can't imagine you give apologies, Ten had said before, and she'd been right, but Liraz thought that she would now, She would apologize for Savvath. If her voice was her own. If it wasn't reeling out of her, rising and falling in a sound that might have been laughter and might-if she weren't Liraz and it weren't unthinkable-have been sobbing.In truth, it was both. She was going to lose her arms, the clean way or the less clean, and here's where the laughter came in: It was horrific, and it was sadistic, and it was also, literally, a dream come true.
— Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters
It's why I get miffed at all the dashing around in recent zombie films. It completely misses the point; transforms the threat to a straightforward physical danger from the zombies themselves, rather than our own inability to avoid them and these films are about us, not them. There's far more meat on the bones of the latter, far more juicy interpretation to get our teeth into. The first zombie is by comparison thin and one dimensional and ironically, it is down to all the exercise.
— Simon Pegg, Nerd Do Well
We're all hunters in my family, you know. Deer, ducks…damsels.
— Nenia Campbell, Terrorscape
Where got she her sullen mouthAnd where her swaying form?Would she live on eggs and applesWhen the blood of men is warm?(“The Young Witch”)
— George Sterling, The Thirst of Satan: Poems of Fantasy and Terror
You can get used to horror, he thought. When it has lost immediacy and is no longer pungent and has become a steady diet. When it has degraded to a chain of mind-numbing events. (“Lover When You're Near Me”)
— Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1
You ate my dog, you undead freak!”Hey! Watch the slander. I hear the acceptable term is ‘corporeallychallenged’ now. No need to be rude.
— Adam P. Knave, Crazy Little Things
You know, there was a time when childbirth was possibly the most terrifying thing you could do in your life, and you were literally looking death in the face when you went ahead with it. And so this is a kind of flashback to a time when that's what every woman went through. Not that they got ripped apart, but they had no guarantees about whether they were going to live through it or not. You know, I recently read - and I don't read nonfiction, generally - Becoming Jane Austen. That's the one subject that would get me to go out and read nonfiction. And the author's conclusion was that one of the reason's Jane Austen might not have married when she did have the opportunity...well, she watched her very dear nieces and friends die in childbirth! And it was like a death sentence: You get married and you will have children. You have children and you will die. (Laughs) I mean, it was a terrifying world.
— Stephenie Meyer, The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide
Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream.
— Stephen King
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, Nightwalkers
Behind every great hatred is a love story. For I am a man who has known and tasted love. I say “a man” because that is how I know myself. Look at me, and what do you see? Do I not take the form of a man? Do I not feel as you do, suffer as you do, love as you do, mourn as you do? What is the essence of a man, if not these things?
— Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors
THERE IS A LOVELY LITTLE horror story about the peasant who started through the haunted wood—the wood that was, people said, inhabited by devils who took any mortal who came their way. But the peasant thought, as he walked slowly along:I am a good man and have done no wrong. If devils can harm me, then there isn't any justice.A voice behind him said, “There isn't.
— Fredric Brown
Dorothea: "What the fuck are you?"Nix: "A man who wanted to be a God...then changed his mind.
— Clive Barker
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
I always ask myself one question: what is human? What does it mean to be human? Maybe people will consider my new films brutal again. But this violence is just a reflection of what they really are, of what is in each one of us to certain degree.
— Kim Ki-duk
Deep inside her (ih her harrowed soul) she felt a glowing ember of fury at the man responsible for this. Tha man who had put her in this position. She looked at the pistol lying beside the basin, and knew that if he were here, she would use it on him without a moment's hesitation. Knowing that made her feel confused about herself. It also made her feel a little stronger.
— Stephen King, Full Dark, No Stars
Finch was his own country, the government unstable, the population volatile.
— Kealan Patrick Burke, KIN
I write about the scariest monsters: The ones inside us all. And the ones that want to eat what is inside us all.
— Aaron Marcusson
Sing a song of suspense in which the players die.Four and twenty ravens in an Edgar Allan Pie.When the pie was broken, the ravens couldn't sing.Their throats had been sliced open by Stephen, the new King.The King was in his writing house, stifling a laughWhile his queen was in a tizzy of her bloody Lovecraft.When the dead maid got the garden for her rank as royal whore,King's shovel made it double and he married nevermore.
— Jessica McHugh
Depression was like wearing tinted glasses and looking through them changed one's perception dramatically. A fancy new house could be construed as a bunch of boards nailed together.
— A.J. Gallant, Madman in the Mirror
You have the right to remain silent,' the big cop said in his robot's voice. 'If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I'm going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?
— Stephen King, Desperation
If on thoughts of death we are fed,Thus, a coffin, became my bed.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Phantom Phantasia: Poetry for the Phantom of the Opera Phan
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, The Woman in the Portrait
Neither spoke, but lat silently listening to the ticking of the clock. A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall. The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock came so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage. He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated. Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him. A third knock sounded through the house.
— W.W. Jacobs, The Monkey's Paw
Believe in yourself, Follow your dreams, and all things are possible!
— Garry E. Lewis
I never saw a dollar bill cry at anyone's funeral.
— J. Lincoln Fenn
Rena: Come on. Who was that man?Keiichi: I-I don't know him!Rena: Liar. What were you talking about?Keiichi: S-S-Something that doesn't have anything to do with you!Rena: Oh...Ah-ha-ha. Oh. So it has nothing to do with us...Keiichi: Th-That's right...Rena: You're lying!!
— Ryukishi07, Higurashi When They Cry: Curse Killing Arc, Vol. 2
It's not the books by Stephen King that I read,I need protection from the things in my head . . .
— Jimmy Buffett
The book is that is the good one is Woodsong and we are trying to finish it.
— Gary Paulsen, Woodsong
There are dread secrets that none may know and have peace. More, secrets that render whosoever knoweth them an alien unto the tribe he belongs to, that cause him to walk alone on earth, for he who takes, pays.
— E. Hoffmann Price
Never will you talk to me like that again.
— Stephen King, The Eyes of the Dragon
When Lisa awoke she was back in the cell on the floor covered in her own blood, dirt, and urine. And that was only day 1.
— Mia Moore, 22
Magic is a naughty beast.
— Rob E. Boley, That Wicked Apple: Snow White & Even More Zombies
Automatically, like all healthy, normal beings, I deny the existence of horror...
— Leland Hall, Cold Harbour / Sinister House
Bodies lay in the sun. Bodies stood in the sun.
— N.J. Hallard, Breaking News: An Autozombiography
It ain't the blows we're dealt that matter, but the ones we survive.
— Stephen King, Rose Madder
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, Psycho
It is hard to look at the tumor and not come away with the feeling that one has encountered a powerful monster in its infancy
— Siddhartha Mukherjee
Losers are not necessary in this world.
— Ryukishi07
The loneliest place to spend eternity is your own life after you can't change it anymore."--Lucifer from Kevin
— Bruce Jenvey, Kevin
When she had died, his anchor was gone and the world had burned from his untethered insanity.
— Cedric Nye, Jango's Anthem
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, Gil's All Fright Diner
...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, The Haunting of Hill House
Snow came back, but she didn't come back right.
— Rob E. Boley, That Risen Snow: Snow White & Zombies
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, Apartment 16
I thought it was foolish mumbo jumbo when I was alive - then I woke up dead.
— C.V. Hunt, Danse Macabre
Either way, it happened, and everyone was going to pretend that it didn't.
— C.V. Hunt, Danse Macabre
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, A Bloody Bloody Mess In the Wild Wild West
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, The Long Walk
Life's a bitch and then you keep on fucking living.
— Will Elliott, The Pilo Family Circus
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, Maldoror and Poems
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, For the Blood is the Life and Other Stories
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, The Thing on the Doorstep
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, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps
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, Lovecraft Unbound
Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown
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, Perpetual Night
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, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
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, Seeing Red
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, Red Harvest
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, Saamaanthaa
Richard felt about as conspicuous as a foreskin at a Jewish nudist camp.
— Dylan J. Morgan, HOSTS
Did I never tell you Sassicaia makes me horny?
— Steve Emmett, Diavolino
Another big mistake you women make, never underestimate the cunning of a killer
— Mia Moore, 22
(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, The Haunted Dusk
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, Blood
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, Carmilla
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, It
There are those who don't understand the nobility of horror fiction. 'Isn't there enough horror in the world?' they ask. For all other forms of literature, the value of human life is optional. For horror fiction, it's absolutely necessary. If we don't value the life of the threatened protagonist, we can't be scared. And through our fear, we better understand the individual fears and values of our species across the world.
— Ebenezer Cobham Brewer
The only constant in this reality is change...
— Brian Fatah Steele, In Bleed Country
Just tell yourself they're only stories. Pamela K. Kinney (Spectre Nightmares and Visitations)
— Pamela K. Kinney
UNDERTAKER!” the head boomed. “BOY, DO I HAVE A JOB FOR YOU!
— Tom Upton
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, Cold Harbour / Sinister House
Evil is nothing more than that, which was once divine, and has fallen into shit." Indrid Night - Through A Glass Darkly.
— Donald Allen Kirch, Through A Glass Darkly
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, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories
Darnell had received what is called a sound commercial education, and would therefore have found very great difficulty in putting into articulate speech any thought that was worth thinking;
— Arthur Machen
Even if I had convict ancestry, I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. As far as I’m concerned, the real criminals back in those days weren’t twelve-year-old boys nicking a loaf of bread or a pair of socks to ward off hunger and blisters. No, it was those who exploited them; keeping the battler in the gutter while they sat around in their manors, sipping tea and admiring portraits of their toffee-nosed great grandfathers.
— Cameron Trost
To those of you who are yet to plunge into the zygote pool and want to know what both plumbless horror and pure love feels like, have yourself a baby...
— Conrad Williams
She resisted the urge to run, only prey ran [and] Niko had no intention on becoming prey
— Kayti Nika Raet, Niko
I said, "I want to wear something funny and cool. Marjorie, could I wear your sparkly baseball hat?"The three of us looked at Marjorie.Now I remember thinking that her answer could change everything back to the way it was; Dad could find a job and stop praying all the time and Mom could be happy and call Marjorie shellfish again and show us funny videos she found on YouTube, and we all could eat more than just spaghetti at dinner and, most important, Marjorie could be normal again. Everything would be okay if Marjorie would only say yes to me wearing the sparkly sequined baseball hat, the one she'd made in art class a few years ago.The longer we watched Marjorie and waited for her response, the more the temperature in the room dropped and I knew that nothing would ever be the same again.She stopped twisting her spaghetti around her fingers. She opened her mouth, and vomit slowly oozed out onto her spaghetti plate.Dad: "Jesus!"Mom: "Honey, are you okay?" She jumped out of her seat and went over to Marjorie, stood behind her, and held her hair up.Marjorie didn't react to either parent, and she didn't make any sounds. She wasn't retching or convulsing involuntarily like one normally does when throwing up. It just poured out of her as though her mouth was an opened faucet. The vomit was as green as spring grass, and the masticated pasta looked weirdly dry, with a consistency of mashed-up dog food.She watched Dad the whole time as the vomit filled her plate, some of it slopping over the edges and onto the table. When she finished she wiped her mouth on her sleeve. "No, Merry. You can't wear my hat." She didn't sound like herself. Her voice was lower, adult, and growly. "You might get something on it. I don't want you to mess it up." She laughed.Dad: "Marjorie..."Marjorie coughed and vomited more onto her too-full plate. "You can't wear the hat because you're going to die someday." She found a new voice, this one treacly baby-talk. "I don't want dead things wearing my very special hat.
— Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts
Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other. They’re us with hats on. The zombies in George Romero’s movies are us. They’re hungry. Monsters are us, the dangerous parts of us. The part that wants to destroy. The part of us with the reptile brain. The part of us that’s vicious and cruel. We express these in our stories as these monsters out there.
— John Carpenter
Morris chopped off the girl's hand with a hatchet then guttered laughter. The poor mulato wailed, her stump pumping. "What'choo do that for!" Cutton bellowed. He hadn't even gotten his trousers off before Morris had pulled this move.
— Edward Lee, The Black Train
Keep driving," said a soft voice in my ear. "She will not bite if you keep driving."Fuck that. Fuck that idea like the fucking Captain of the Thai Fuck Team fucking at the fucking Tour de Fuck.
— David Wong, John Dies at the End
It is not what we know that scares us, it is what we do not
— A.G. Phillips
[M]y mother read a horror novel every night. She had read every one in the library. When birthdays and Christmas would come, I would consider buying her a new one, the latest Dean R. Koontz or Stephen King or whatever, but I couldn't. I didn't want to encourage her. I couldn't touch my father's cigarettes, couldn't look at the Pall Mall cartons in the pantry. I was the sort of child who couldn't even watch commercials for horror movies - the ad for Magic, the movie where marionette kills people. sent me into a six-month nightmare frenzy. So I couldn't look at her books, would turn them over so their covers wouldn't show, the raised lettering and splotches of blood - especially the V.C. Andrews oeuvre, those turgid pictures of those terrible kids, standing so still, all lit in blue.
— Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Either the gates of hell had opened, or Tom had lost his mind; for there could be nothing like this entity outside the precincts of the damned, except in the fevered fantasies of a raving paranoid psychopath
— Dean Koontz, 77 Shadow Street
It was an unusual sunset. Having sat behind opaque drapery all day, I had not realized that a storm was pushing in and that much of the sky was the precise shade of old suits of armor one finds in museums. At the same time, patches of brilliance engaged in a territorial dispute with the oncoming onyx of the storm. Light and darkness mingled in strange ways both above and below. Shadows and sunshine washed together, streaking the landscape with an unearthly study of glare and gloom. Bright clouds and black folded into each other in a no-man's land of the sky. The autumn trees took on the appearance of sculptures formed in a dream, their leaden-colored trunks and branches and iron-red leaves all locked in an infinite and unliving moment, unnaturally timeless. The gray lake slowly tossed and tumbled in a dead sleep, nudging unconsciously against its breakwall of numb stone. A scene of contradiction and ambivalence, a tragicomedic haze over all. A land of perfect twilight.
— Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory
She stooped for a stone and dropped it down.'Fancy being where that is now,' she said, peering into the blackness; 'fancy going round and round like a mouse in a pail, clutching at the slimy sides, with the water filling your mouth, and looking up to the little patch of sky above.''You had better come in,' said Benson, very quietly. 'You are developing a taste for the morbid and horrible.' ("The Well")
— W.W. Jacobs, Ghost Stories
You could say that they were sweet, or you could say that they were something out of a horror movie.
— Dan Chaon, Stay Awake
I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
There had stood a great house in the centre of the gardens, where now was left only that fragment of ruin. This house had been empty for a great while; years before his—the ancient man's—birth. It was a place shunned by the people of the village, as it had been shunned by their fathers before them. There were many things said about it, and all were of evil. No one ever went near it, either by day or night. In the village it was a synonym of all that is unholy and dreadful.
— William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland
Momentarily, through one good eye, he could see the moon. Something below moved and he span around to where he could see the house. His family were in there. Alone. He could not protect them and he would not see them again.
— Stephen   Craig, The Drowning Of The Innocents
Sad-looking brown eyes, they wrenched his heart like a gut punch. Worse – hell, worse – a bloke could punch him in the head but he’d stay up, and grin through the bloody split lip, intimidating his attacker; but there was no honour in wounds inside, wounds that only you could deal with.
— Karl Drinkwater, Turner
The horror had begun.
— F. Paul Wilson
I nearly forced my own way through the undergrowth to leave the sight behind. I was afraid I'd encouraged the figure to advance by trying to see it, perhaps even by thinking about it. ("The Long Way")
— Ramsey Campbell, Best New Horror 20
Mere grimness is as easy as grinning; but it requires something to put a handsome face on a story. Narratives become of suspicious merit in proportion as they lean to Newgate-like offenses, particularly of blood and wounds...
— Leigh Hunt
It’s a case of mistaken identity. It’s one big mistake. You weren’t even in the country when it happened.”Maja in the short story 'Metro' by Steen Langstrup
— Steen Langstrup, Metro
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!
— H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon
I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.
— Susan Hill, The Woman in Black
Horror is not unimaginable, it has neither the face of a monster nor the bat-wings of a demon. It is calm and tranquil, and it is durable, lasting whole days and nights, months; years, perhaps. It is not mortal. It strikes at the eyes, only the eyes.
— Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio, The Book of Flights
The dead are jealous, jealous, jealous and they will do anything to keep you from the living, the lucky living. They will argue with you, and distract you, and if that doesn't work, they will even let you hug them, and dance for you, and kiss you, and laugh, anything to keep you. The dead are selfish. Jealous. Lonely. Desperate. Hungry. ("The Chambered Fruit")
— M. Rickert, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now
For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance - or identity - were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness: Collected Stories Volume 1