c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years–if it ever did end–began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
— Stephen King, It
I'm not here to change the world, just your perception of it.
— Grandaddy BAD
The blessings of the devil is the beginning of dread.
— Michael Bassey Johnson, Classic Quotations From The Otherworlds
He roused from a joyous dream of feasting, of drinking blood and sucking warm marrow from the bone. His sons and daughters swarmed like ants upon the surface of the Earth, ripe in their terror, delectable in their anguish. He swept them into his mouth and their insides ran in black streams between his lips and matted his beard. This sweet dream rapidly slipped away as he stretched and assessed his surroundings. He shambled forth from the great cavern in the mountain that had been his home for so long.
— Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
Captain! You can't hold them off! I tried! I swear! They've been artificially enhanced, sir! But all the humans died out - there's bones out there by the millions! They were all suffocated by cuteness! The World is full of kiitens, oh the horror!'My God,' Hadrian said. "They've finally did it! All those oh-so-cute-my-cuddy-kittens-here's-a-pic bastards! They finally went and did it!
— Steven Erikson
I believe,' Muswell once said, 'that mental isolation is the essence of weird fiction. Isolation when confronted with disease, with madness, with horror and with death. These are the reverberations of the infinity that torments us.("The White Hands")
— Mark Samuels, Best New Horror 15
I once made a solemn vow that I could not keep... I am from this world. Even with all its failures and suffering it is still worthy of my best efforts... and wishing it was otherwise does not make it so." Eiij'lam told the king.
— K. Farrell St. Germain, Then'diel's SONG: An Elven Grove Dark Fantasy
No matter how dire a situation may be, I can always find the humor in it somewhere. If I was ever in a horror movie I would be the goofy one who doesn't seem to know quite what's going on but survives to the end with witty one-liners.
— A.J. Rose
If you were to tell the thing down at the bottom of that pit it had napped through forty-two presidential inaugurations, eight British coronations, sixteen popes and three number ones by the Danish pop group, Aqua, it would have told you to stop talking nonsense and shut the fuck up. It had slept, somewhat peacefully, through Emmet’s Insurrection, World War I and II, Vietnam, and even the Great War of Blur Vs. Oasis.
— Adam Millard, Vinyl Destination
Curtis Bane screamed and though I came around fast and fired in the same motion, he’d already pulled a heater and begun pumping metal at me. We both missed and I was empty, that drum clicking uselessly. I went straight at him. Happily, he too was out of bullets and I closed the gap and slammed the butt of the rifle into his chest. Should’ve knocked him down, but no. The bastard was squat and powerful as a wild animal, thanks to being a coke fiend, no doubt. He ripped the rifle from my grasp and flung it aside. He locked his fists and swung them up into my chin, and it was like getting clobbered with a hammer, and I sprawled into a row of trash cans. Stars zipped through my vision. A leather cosh dropped from his sleeve into his hand and he knew what to do with it all right. He swung it in a short chopping blow at my face and I got my left hand up and the blow snapped my two smallest fingers, and he swung again and I turned my head just enough that it only squashed my ear and you better believe that hurt, but now I’d drawn the sawback bayonet I kept strapped to my hip, a fourteen-inch grooved steel blade with notched and pitted edges—Jesus-fuck who knew how many Yankee boys the Kraut who’d owned it gashed before I did for him—and stabbed it to the guard into Bane’s groin. Took a couple of seconds for Bane to register it was curtains. His face whitened and his mouth slackened, breath steaming in the chill, his evil soul coming untethered. He had lots of gold fillings. He lurched away and I clutched his sleeve awkwardly with my broken hand and rose, twisting the handle of the blade side to side, turning it like a car crank into his guts and bladder, putting my shoulder and hip into it for leverage. He moaned in panic and dropped the cosh and pried at my wrist, but the strength was draining from him and I slammed him against the wall and worked the handle with murderous joy. The cords of his neck went taut and he looked away, as if embarrassed, eyes milky, a doomed petitioner gaping at Hell in all its fiery majesty. I freed the blade with a cork-like pop and blood spurted down his leg in a nice thick stream and he collapsed, folding into himself like a bug does when it dies.
— Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the mirror, fills my brain and I’m rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail. That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my “essential saltes” as it were, I’m the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang.
— Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
The dead have highways." Clive Barker
— Clive Barker
Laying here in my grave..at last.. I am finally alone.
— Grandaddy BAD
Todd’s wife was one of those women with a forced smile perpetually cemented on her face. Even after being chased by a mob of homicidal maniacs and attempting to barricade doors with barstools she kept up appearances, practicing for the days when her husband would be running for public office. When she saw her son poking at their former mail carrier’s dead body a look of utter horror came across her face for the slightest instant. She caught herself and put that smile back on so quickly Will wondered if she might have pulled a few cheek muscles.	“Trevor!” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Trevor, you get away from that this instant! You don’t know what kind of diseases that man had. Children shouldn’t play with dead things.”	Will looked at Todd and smirked. “Cute kid. How many of those things do you think are out there?
— Ian  McClellan, One Undead Step
I told you. I’ve been watching.” She twirled, her arms outstretched. “Watching, watching, watching.
— A.F. Stewart, Killers and Demons II: They Return
I once made a solemn vow that I could not keep... I am from this world. Even with all its failures and suffering it is still worthy of my best efforts... and wishing it was otherwisedoes not make it so." Eiij'lam told the king.
— K. Farrell St. Germain, Then'diel's SONG: An Elven Grove Dark Fantasy
The Kahn spoke to his disfigured expert. Mal-Greb, confused at first, listened, nodded and bowed his head like the slave he was. Jani Beg momentarily seized with energy grabbed the smaller man by the shoulders and breathed into his face “Hurl them back to Hell!”The wild look in the Kahn’s eyes was something that Mal-Greb understood.And so they began.
— Karl P.T. Walsh, The Rat King
Underground, in the dark wet hole that was home to the spiders and the rats, something moved. It had no right to be down there but it belonged nowhere else. Half drowned half alive it pushed the water ahead of it into the culverts and drains as it passed. Right under the city and out into the suburbs and fields these tunnels fed into the river and the network of canals that had fed the industrial revolution. A thousand eyes, some blinded, that had never seen the sun strained in the soiled darkness. It struggled on and it listened with a thousand ears not its own and it cried.
— Karl P.T. Walsh, The Rat King
Many of my readers are women and some of them email me their thoughts about the stories I’ve written. Almost all of them find a delicious pleasure in being totally frightened by the strange and dark side of life. Perhaps it’s because horror books are an escape from our sometimes-mundane lives? Or could it be that many of us actually do have a private darker side that we like to explore secretly through books, movies and music?
— Sara Brooke
Other folk thought the Rage was simple bloodlust, a berserk savagery that neither knew nor cared what its target was, and so it was when it struck without warning. But when a hradani gave himself to it knowingly, it was as cold as it was hot, as rational as it was lethal. To embrace the Rage was to embrace a splendor, a glory, a denial of all restraint but not of reason. It was pure, elemental purpose, unencumbered by compassion or horror or pity, yet it was far more than mere frenzy.
— David Weber, Oath of Swords
Every small town has at least one house the children whisper about; the type of house that has always been abandoned; where the once pristine white paint has faded to a grimy gray; where the windows are boarded, and the lawn never grows; where children hold their breath and close their eyes as they pass by. A house that sounds like it contains an army of whispering spirits when the wind whistles through the nearby trees.In the town of Blackwood, that house could be found on Creep Street. It had stood there as long as he could remember.
— The Blood Brothers, The House on Creep Street
There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take.
— Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot
The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul. The town is an accumulation of three parts which, in sum, are greater than the sections. The town is the people who live there, the buildings which they have erected to den or do business in, and it is the land.
— Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot
She wasn’t religious. She didn’t believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, Ouija boards, tables which rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers
— Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
The smell slaps me sideways. Like when Mom grabs a container she forgot about from the back of the fridge and she says, “Here Mickey, smell this and see if it’s still good,” and I open it and take a whiff before noticing the fuzz. Like that.
— Mick Bogerman, How to Navigate Zombie Cave and Defeat Pirate Pete
After torturing our adrenaline by watching a horror movie for a couple of hours the places we are most afraid of are the doors and windows of the room even though they are the only ways for us to escape in case of occurrence such an event.
— Sanhita Baruah
In supernatural horror stories, however, magical thinking is a completely different matter. Those characters contending with what seems to be the work of magic will deny till the very last moment that anything magical is going on. They will invoke reason and evidence and eek out corroborations for the cause of their problems. But readers of these stories are rarely, if ever, on the side of these characters. They desperately want to believe that there is indeed something magical going on and they are primed to accept it whenever it occurs. Some readers especially enjoy a story with bad magic, as it assures them that magic is confined to fiction and will not leak into their real lives. This is the most perverse form of magical thinking and the one least likely to be recognized as such.
— Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory, Vol. 2
Joey glanced at his alarm clock and saw it was just before midnight. His eyes drifted to his bookshelf. Lined up in a row, in the order of their publication, were all of the Spook Boys books, a series of kids’ books about two adventurous brothers who were constantly getting into mischief as they explored haunted houses and spooky old castles, or tried to solve mysteries involving missing diamonds or stolen paintings. Joey envied the characters in those books—he wanted his own life to be made up of such exciting, implausible adventures. But maybe his imagination had gotten carried away. Maybe his mind, saturated with such fictional tales, was more than willing to play tricks on him when it came to houses like the one on Creep Street.
— The Blood Brothers, The House on Creep Street
Where do bad folks go when they die? No heaven awaits them, say to it goodbye
— Suren Hakobyan, Edge of End
Moonlight flooded in the windows and silvered the room, turning it into a lagoon of dreams
— Stephen King
We tossed away the horror formula right from the beginning.
— Val Lewton
Bruises and dried blood covered her face, giving the illusion of chicken pox.
— Yawatta Hosby, One By One
Stupidity is the chlorine that cleans out the gene pool.
— Scott M. Baker, The Vampire Hunters
Birds chirped and hawked in the distance. A group of them, maybe vultures, circled the sky. Rae glanced at the blanket. Those damn birds could probably smell Marissa, and the second everyone left, they'd pounce on her.
— Yawatta Hosby, One By One
Yeah, there has to be a few screws loose when a girl asks you to drop everything to spend a three-day weekend on very short notice, and you say okey dokey without a care in the world.
— Yawatta Hosby, One By One
Just one pit stop, Rae. One pit stop that won't even take an hour. Then it's over. It's finally over.
— Yawatta Hosby, One By One
Does it have a bed?" Liz asked doing her best to prop him up."A couple of old army cots that probably have more mildew than a politician has bullshit.
— Hunter Shea, Swamp Monster Massacre
Famine was a dirty bitch with rotten fangs, but the hunger she put in a belly bit sharp nonetheless.
— T. Frohock, The Broken Road
He'd wanted to mend her just like his mother had mended his favorite teddy bear when his arm had come loose after too much play. He offered her his pudding cup instead.
— Brooke Warra
You tell a soul or even God Hisself what you seen when the rougarou changes , or even that you met one, and a year ain’t passed, you’re liable to change to one yourself.
— Samuel Snoek-Brown, Hagridden
He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2
Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.
— H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon
Even then I found the word fitting, soothing.Fireflies.Fire flies.Fire, fly.
— Rin Chupeco, The Girl from the Well
That her niece should find such profound pleasure in the company of a thirteen-year-old black girl--and, more to the point, always within the precincts of Elinor's house--was a slap in Mary-Love's face. She decided, without saying anything more to James, to wreck Grace's perfection of happiness. Grace would learn that she, Mary-Love, was the source of all felicity within the Caskey family.
— Michael McDowell, Blackwater II: The Levee
All of my chupacabra books are like novelizations of movies that haven’t been made yet.
— Raegan Butcher
You can’t suspend me…I quit. I’ve seen a new side to this company in the past few months. I want nothing to do with it. Consider this as me giving in my notice. Now get away from my computer so I can finish my fucking job.” - Vincent
— Stuart Keane, The Customer Is Always...
Mary-Love liked to see herself as the family cornucopia, dispensing all manner of good things, unstintingly, unceasingly. She considered herself amply rewarded by her children's gratitude, and if she perceived that her children were not sufficiently grateful, she could make something of that, too.
— Michael McDowell, Blackwater II: The Levee
Maybe I'll really try to kiss her, even if I fall through her like a raindrop.
— James B. Willard
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, Chasing Azrael
Ebola then turns the insides of its host into jelly: you begin to vomit black junk which is basically your dissolved liver and internal organs.
— Andrew Cormier, Shamblers: The Zombie Apocalypse
The century's getting old and stale
—  it needs new tribes.
Am I Dead?"Had she fallen to her doom and this was all an elaborate fantasy? Was this the place between life and death? Her eyes welled up with tears and she ran towards the man that wasn't there, wanting to cling to him, to find something to save her from this torture.
— M. Keep, Theodora's Descent
It had initially been thought that the zombie virus was an offshoot of Ebola. Many zombie-virus symptoms mimicked the terrible, hemorrhagic fever.
— Andrew Cormier, Shamblers: The Zombie Apocalypse
The gravedigger knew a fine trick. When the worms looked unhappy he would leave his place in the mausoleum and go up into the sunshine. He would go empty-handed, but when he returned, with him came a most exquisite corpse. The worms would rejoice, and they would feast upon the corpse until they were fat and could feast no more. The young would come with the old to see this trick and glory in it. No worm knew where the gravedigger got his corpses, but they were always succulent and nourishing. They praised the gravedigger’s generosity. -- From "Worms
— L. Joseph Shosty, Swallow the Evil
I knew the end would come, one day. I knew my life deserved to be over. Yet, even knowing that, I was no less fearful.
— Stacie Evans, Crying Bloody Murder
Rushing out the door on his way back to the street, he ran into someone with his shoulder. Turning to apologize to them, he stopped, horrified at what he saw.It was the white-eyed man he’d met a week ago.	“Watch your back.” He said standing there just long enough for Raven to take in the meat between his teeth, the milky, nearly opaque color of his eyes and the madness within them. Then, after only a few seconds, he was gone, vanished into the crowd as if he had never existed.	Certain his mind was playing tricks and tired of being terrified for his sanity, he headed down the street as fast as he could in pursuit. As he rushed through the tightly packed crowd, he saw others like the man he’d just seen, and each of their white eyes gazed blankly into his. A woman here, a hunched drifter there, shapes and faces that shifted and darted all around him. “Watch your back.” They hissed, and he tried to move faster, his heart racing and the nerves of his body jangling painfully with fear as he fought to get beyond them.	Hands reached out for his clothes, pulling him in different directions as they tugged and he struggled to be free. Their fingers felt like talons clasped into the folds and gaps of his clothing, ripping and popping stitches in their fervor to gain some small grasp on his flesh beneath his jacket. Along with the horror of their cold, dead eyes, he could smell some strangeness—a sickly sweet smell of rot and decay only barely closeted by preserving fluids. The smell dug into his sinuses as their fingers and hands dug at him. He gagged, his teeth clenched tight as he exerted energy he didn’t really have. He pushed away from them and on through the empty space he saw at the end of this group of pedestrians. Many of whom mingled with what he now felt must be the dead, wholly unaware of why he flailed and pushed against them.
— Amanda M. Lyons
Of all the problems and complications in my life, I had not expected love to be one of them.
— Stacie Evans, Crying Bloody Murder
tiCK TOck TicK tOCk tICK TocK tIcK
— Stacie Evans, Crying Bloody Murder
He came through the door howling, an axe arched high over his head. His eyes danced in madness, stuck fast on the two of them kissing, caught in their embrace and unaware of him. For a moment they went on, oblivious, untouched by the madman soon to come. It was a bright bubble of illusion on the eve of utter and complete madness. She was the first to see. The image of her stepfather captured in Mateo’s eyes, the furious glee of the Nazi’s vengeance, sharp and mirrored in their emerald beauty. Soon those eyes were wide with terror and sorrow in a moment of unbidden regret caught at the end of such happiness.
— Amanda M. Lyons
Pretty doll," rasped the dark haired vampire as he went about behind her, and she could feel his ravenous hunger practically radiating off him.
— J.E. Keep, Theodora's Descent
Later, Aldapuerta spent two years at medical school where he learned the geography of the human body and something of its almost infinite capacity for suffering anddegradation. He took especial delight in tending to the physically incapacitated and wasthankful for the loose coats that “prevented the matrona from spotting the engorged cock that I would occasionally press against the bedridden patient”.
— Jesus I. Aldapuerta, The Eyes: Emetic Fables from the Andalusian de Sade
Gregory writes of Armageddon as if the Devil is getting off on using him literally to write that iniquitous beast into existence, into the flesh. I believe both Gregory and Jamie Stillingsworth are being used as vessels to bring about the end of days.
— A.K. Kuykendall, The Possession
THE THING WAS AN EXPERT IN HORROR, BUT THIS HUMAN HORROR INDEED EXCEEDED ANY OTHER POSSIBLE FATE. NOT ONLY BECAUSE IT WAS WITHOUT MERCY, BUT BECAUSE IT WAS ACTED UPON RATIONALLY AND WITHOUT COMPULSION. IT WAS A CHOICE. THE KILLING WAS UNRELATED TO THE LARGE WAR, AND IT SERVED NO OTHER PURPOSE THEN EVIL. MEN CHOSE TO DO THIS TO OTHER MEN AND INVENTED REASONS AND PLACES AND MYTHS IN ORDER TO SATISFY THEIR DESIRE IN A LOGICAL AND METHODICAL WAY.
— Guillermo del Toro, The Strain
Read my book and you shall know thee
— Oscar Sanders
Lionel was filled with awful remorse. He asked where had Thomas been last seen, and the boy told him he was headed for the church. Lionel nodded and went home to fetch his shotgun. Throughout the crisis he had done no violence, preferring to preach the sanity of pacifism to the flock. This was different. This was a requirement of the father to the son. He prayed over the shotgun while Darla wailed with the children in the living room. He got in his truck and drove to the church. -- From "The South Fork Penance
— L. Joseph Shosty, Swallow the Evil
Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”— “Supernatural Horror in Literature
— H.P. Lovecraft
I don't remember ever signing up for weird. It just sort of happened.
— Justin Alcala
When they were silent for a moment the quiet weight of the house pressed down from all around them.
— Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
The ghosts that exert the most power in people’s lives-at least, the people I know–tend to be of their own making, and consist of equal parts regret and old fears and just plain missing somebody.
— Glen Hirshberg
Is it possible for one to enter sleep and wander while never waking? And if so, for how long can one survive this way?
— Tiffany Apan, Descent
Insanity is the only real escape from the banality of our lives. - Clara Bayliss
— John    Hennessy, Clara's Song
Hurrying on, Barbee nodded to the workman as casually as he could. His skin felt goose-pimpled under the thin red robe, and he couldn't help shivering to a colder chill than he felt in the frosty air. For the quiet city, it seemed to him, was only a veil of painted illusion. Its air of sleepy peace concealed brooding horror, too frightful for sane minds to dwell upon. Even the cheery bricklayer with the lunch pail might - just might - be the monstrous Child of Night.
— Jack Williamson, Darker Than You Think
The marine underworld stretched below the ship and embodied many secrets. The disappearance of Olga had become one of the mysteries that would remain with Stefania and her family. The disappearance of her baby sister and sudden departure from her home had taught the ten-year-old that life was filled with uncertainties. But she was willing to forget that for a little while.She jumped down from the barrel and headed toward Liam, Felix, and the other shipmates. They would sing shanties and talk of the constellations, the sea, its creatures, and the legends. It would get her through another night.La Suerte was the only stability for her passengers with the infinite unknown all around them. The waters of the sea, the world below the surface, and the sky that stretched beyond the horizon was a representation of the limitless possibilites and dangers awaiting those aboard.
— Tiffany Apan, Descent
And maybe that is exactly what happened…he walked away and never woke up…
— Tiffany Apan, Descent
What was it? What could it--His last thought was surprise.
— Peter Benchley, Beast
Books like Twilight are not art. They are mass-produced crap that is meant to be consumed by the widest possible audience, for the largest possible profit.
— Oliver Gaspirtz
I am beyond good and evil at this point. I am beyond the lines drawn in the sand by society at this juncture. I am beyond fear, beyond religion, beyond the morals and mores. I am Lord of the Fucking Flies. Do you understand?
— Jason S. Hornsby, Every Sigh, the End
I have no powers of my own. I'm a dud.
— Deborah Barreto, Shadow Riser
They walked until the light died in the sky. Until it was dark, and Donald started to hear the whispers. They pleaded out to him in languages he couldn’t understand. Except when they were in Eng
— Sean M. Thompson, Rhonny Reapers Roadkill Cafe
Cora didn't know a whole lot about wendigo, but there were ways in which they were just like people: they wanted above everything to live through the night("Stay")
— Leah Bobet, The Best Horror of the Year Volume Four
The rumor claims that the shambler virus is now airborne. It can be contracted without getting bitten now.” – character quote
— Andrew Cormier, Shamblers: the zombie apocalypse
Thinking about such things soothed the creature as it dug at the base of a tall oak tree, deep into the ground, covering itself with dirt and leaves and moss; hiding, healing, waiting.
— Joe DeRouen, Small Things
Shawn slowly climbed the old wooden stairs, listening to the low creak that sounded from his footsteps. He hoped the wood wouldn’t collapse beneath him. But the stairs held strong and a moment later he joined his friend in the kitchen of the old house, a wave of suffocating humidity washing over them as they stepped deeper into its secrets.
— Joe DeRouen, Small Things
I don’t know. How can you know? I…I’m a monster. When I’m hungry, I might do anything.""Oh no, of course I couldn’t possibly understand you." Violet’s shadowed face seemed to be wearing a grim and serious smile. "I know, you woke up one day and found out that you couldn’t be the person you remembered being, the little girl everybody expected you to be. You just weren’t her any more, and there was nothing you could do about it. So your family decided you were a monster and turned on you." Violet sighed, staring out into the darkness."Believe me, I do understand that. And let me tell you - from one monster to another - that just because somebody tells you you’re a monster, it doesn’t mean you are."just now you told me what you did because you want me to stop you from eating Pen. If you were a real monster, you wouldn’t have done that, would you?" Trista’s eyes stung, and she wiped strands of cobweb away with her sleeve."Idiot," added Violet, for good measure.
— Frances Hardinge, Cuckoo Song
A monster crosses over into the everyday world. The mortals struggle and show great courage, but it’s no use. The monster kills first the guilty, then the innocent, until finally only one remains. The Last Boy, the Last Girl. There is a final battle. The Last One suffers great wounds, but in the final moment vanquishes the monster. Only later does he or she recognize that this is the monster’s final trick; the scars run deep, and the awareness of the truth grows like an infection. The Last One knows that the monster isn’t dead, only sent to the other side. There it waits until it can slip into the mundane world again. Perhaps next time it will be a knife-wielding madman, or a fanged beast, or some nameless tentacled thing. It’s the monster with a thousand faces. The details matter only to the next victims.
— Daryl Gregory, We Are All Completely Fine
Compassion for human hurt, a humble sense of our impermanence, an absolute valuation of justice—all of our so-called virtues only trouble us and serve to bolster, not assuage, horror. In addition, these qualities are our least vital, the least in line with life. More often than not, they stand in the way of one’s rise in the welter of this world, which found its pace long ago and has not deviated from it since. The putative affirmations of life—each of them based on the propaganda of Tomorrow: reproduction, revolution in its widest sense, piety in any form you can name—are only affirmations of our desires. And, in fact, these affirmations affirm nothing but our penchant for self-torment, our mania to preserve a demented innocence in the face of gruesome facts.By means of supernatural horror we may evade, if momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation. Every one of us, having been stolen from nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world and looks down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration. What a weird scenario. So why affirm anything, why make a pathetic virtue of a terrible necessity? We are destined to a fool’s fate that deserves to be mocked. And since there is no one else around to do the mocking, we will take on the job. So let us indulge in cruel pleasures against ourselves and our pretensions, let us delight in the Cosmic Macabre. At least we may send up a few bitter laughs into the cobwebbed corners of this crusty old universe.Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Admittedly, this is not a practice likely to find universal favor. True macabrists are as rare as poets and form a secret society by the bad-standing of their memberships elsewhere, some of their outside affiliations having been cancelled as early as birth. But those who have gotten a good whiff of other worlds and sampled a cuisine marginal to stable existence will not be able to stay themselves from the uncanny feast of horrors that has been laid out for them. They will loiter in moonlight, eyeing the entranceways to cemeteries, waiting for some propitious moment to crash the gates and see what is inside.Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: “We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willingly consume the terrors of the tomb…and find them to our liking.
— Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer
What if all religiouns were stories, and all stories were true?
— Rick Chiantaretto, Death of the Body
Holding onto anger is like carrying a bucket of poison. Every step you walk, it splashes onto yourself and others. When you finally reach the one who deserves it, you have poisoned yourself and many other innocent people.
— Dean Henryson, A Love in Darkness
No one dreamed them up. No one needed to. The vampire clawing at the window, the werewolf prowling the moor, the hags at the crossroads – they lurked here already. Some nightmares are ancient, as old as civilization. Some are older still.
— Robert Dunbar, Vortex
The king who stepped into the ballroom wearing a green velvet robe and bejeweled crown was none other that the tiger-man who'd prowled through my nightmares and nearly every waking moment for the past two days. Chorda.
— Kat Falls, Inhuman
And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him.
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
Compassion for human hurt, a humble sense of our impermanence, an absolute valuation of justice—all of our so-called virtues only trouble us and serve to bolster, not assuage, horror. In addition, these qualities are our least vital, the least in line with life. More often than not, they stand in the way of one’s rise in the welter of this world, which found its pace long ago and has not deviated from it since. The putative affirmations of life—each of them based on the propaganda of Tomorrow: reproduction, revolution in its widest sense, piety in any form you can name—are only affirmations of our desires. And, in fact, these affirmations affirm nothing but our penchant for self-torment, our mania to preserve a demented innocence in the face of gruesome facts.By means of supernatural horror we may evade, if momentarily, the horrific reprisals of affirmation. Every one of us, having been stolen from nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world and looks down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration. What a weird scenario. So why affirm anything, why make a pathetic virtue of a terrible necessity? We are destined to a fool’s fate that deserves to be mocked. And since there is no one else around to do the mocking, we will take on the job. So let us indulge in cruel pleasures against ourselves and our pretensions, let us delight in the Cosmic Macabre. At least we may send up a few bitter laughs into the cobwebbed corners of this crusty old universe.
— Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer
For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it. It is not an illness you can cure yourself of by standing up and letting the big red cinema seat fold itself up behind you.
— Chris Cleave, Little Bee
I remembered what it was like to die-the pain, the fear, the doubt, and the unknown. Somehow I had cheated death once. Now I was about to try again.
— Rick Chiantaretto, Death of the Body
I didn't panic until my chest collapsed and I couldn't breathe. I gasped until I no longer had a throat to do it with. I didn't feel like I was holding my breath - it was more like I had no lungs.
— Rick Chiantaretto, Death of the Body
What if all religions were stories, and all stories were true.
— Rick Chiantaretto, Death of the Body
There are things that go bump in the night
— Anonymous
He shouldn't say things like that in front of the artworks, especially when they're angry, but he always does.
— Donna K. Fitch, The Color of Darkness and Other Stories
Those in their snug Bed-chambers may call the Fears of Night meer Bugbears, but their Minds have not pierced into the Horror of the World which others, who are adrift upon it, know.
— Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
There was blood on the hair of his chinny chin chin.
— Fawn Bonning, The Leader of Lors
Where moments before the bright morning sun flickered through the branches of the huge oak trees surrounding the property, every-thing in a ten yard radius immediately went pitch dark. The air, already a chilly fifty degrees, dropped past freezing in an instant, and the pressure changed to the point where he thought his eardrums might burst.
— Joe DeRouen, Threads
People do not ever change. The person you see later is merely the one that was hidden from you in the beginning. Shane KP O'Neill - The Gates Of Babylon.
— Shane K.P. O'Neill
Profanity is the expression of a lesser mind.
— Shane K.P. O'Neill
He breathed in hard. The stench of blood filled his lungs. Only now, for the first time, could he truly appreciate it.
— Shane K.P. O'Neill, Bound By Blood: Volume 2 (Bound By Blood, #2)
Bodies lay strewn all around. Turkish and Wallachian warriors caught in the intimate indiscriminate embrace of death.
— Shane K.P. O'Neill, Bound By Blood: Volume 1 (Bound By Blood, #1)
Romance is not the giving of flowers, or any other gift. It is a way of life, a way of being. Romance is every thought, gesture, and deed on your part to make another feel special, even if only for a moment. For a moment can last a lifetime in the heart of the recipient, be that the one you love, or a complete stranger.
— Shane K.P. O'Neill
Exercise care with what it is you do when you hold my heart in your hands. For it is my love that makes you special. When it is gone, you shall soon know it and you shall be special no more.Shane KP O'Neill - The Gates Of Babylon
— Shane K.P. O'Neill
The beauty of a woman is that no two are the same. They are all different. It follows then that to be successful as a lover, you cannot make love to any two in the same way.
— Shane K.P. O'Neill, The Path To Decay (Vlad Dracula, #2)
He knew what he had found here, a precious treasure that had remained hidden away for so long. To the right man, she could give more happiness and fulfilment than any amount of gold, or gems. Just by holding her in his arms, he knew this. He had the key to her heart in his hands. All he had to do was unlock her, and he would enjoy the most wondrous chest of delights. He knew it and he knew, too, that nothing would ever compensate him should he lose her.
— Shane K.P. O'Neill, Bound By Blood: Volume 1 (Bound By Blood, #1)
Black vomit came gushing out Samantha’s mouth, adding to the puddle already on the floor. Samantha was covered in a sheen of sweat, crouched on all fours on the wooden hallway floor, like an animal. Her thick yellow fingernails made deep scratches in the wood as her body convulsed with each new expulsion of the black vomit. Her hair was long and thick and full; thicker and fuller than he had ever seen it. It reminded him of a lion’s mane. Her skin was a sickly pale grey with disturbing red boils the size of grapefruit and weeping puss-filled black blotches where others had burst. Spider webs of blue veins were visible under the skin all over her body.
— Joseph M. Chiron, Tagged: The Apocalypse
He first noticed it on the plane ride. There was an odor about her and it was becoming more pronounced with each passing hour. It was like the smell of rotting meat.
— Joseph M. Chiron, Tagged: The Apocalypse
It was a soulless gaze, burning with a wild hatred that shouldn’t be there in anyone who could call themselves a parent.
— Jess C. Scott, Playmates
Let the red dawn surmise What we shall do, When this blue starlight dies And all is through.”(The Yellow Sign)
— Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories
The world's full of wonder, he said. Or at least horror that looks wondrous from afar.
— Luke Scull
I often stood and stared into those tunnels and thought about what happened there; how I was separated from it only by time." - The Procession
— Benjamin Brindise
...My hands shook, and I stared at them. Another loss of control. That was the second time this month. Sooner or later, I’d break, if the department didn’t put me down first.
— Holly Rutan, Silver Bound
One day someone is going to read my autobiography and say “Wow, what a horror novel
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
Come now, I was not about to let that thing eat you.
— Stacy Buck, Squanto Undead: Wake the Undead Part 3
My Heart's still beating for you—Very Dark and Always.
— Rae Hachton, Eternally
No, not my spirit, just my ego, and my arms, and my chest, and my back, but luckily they are just bruised.” Squanto responded, “I fear you may not be so lucky.
— Stacy Buck, Squanto Undead: Wake the Undead Part 1
Irwin was difficult to wake; the poor man was totally wiped out. He collapsed in one of the soft office chairs the moment Smith let him, sliding back into slumber. After he was settled, I sat at my desk and reviewed Smith’s…no, Charles’s notes, shuffling the paper irritably to bring the print into focus. Someday, I’d come up with a melody that fixed my sight problems. And tomorrow, I thought, mocking myself, I’ll find a way to sing away fleas and retire rich.
— Holly Rutan, Silver Bound
This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with its beautiful stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth--a world which now trembles before the King In Yellow.
— Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories
When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
If I catch you, I might do anything. I might strip the skin from your bones as I drain you dry. Or I might drag you into my chambers and have you pleasure me in ways you cannot even imagine. I might even take mercy on you, and that would be the cruelest injustice of all, because for you, it would only be a temporary reprieve.
— Nenia Campbell, Bleeds My Desire
'If life is pain, one could say that killing is an act of compassion. I look forward to my own death, you know. But dying is like losing you virginity. You can only do it once. I'm saving it for the right moment.' 
— Amanda Steiger, Dark Geist
The best horror novels open up, "It was beautiful summer day and the smell of flowers emanated throughout the air.
— Justin Alcala
That's what I fear: being subtracted from myself. Negation. Forced against my will to become a beast.
— Nenia Campbell, Bleeds My Desire
Remember that if I were born of the underworld, you were born of flowers. You are the blood the forest feeds upon, and it is you who gave the woods their dark magic. Time doesn’t exist, and in another world I never left you. I’ve transformed your wounds into a scepter for a queen. The nightcatcher may think that she’s had her victory - but your veins are buried in the map of the earth and she can never have you. She thinks she can own the universe because she’s enslaved gods and eaten stars, but she couldn’t even kill me, living here in her tunnels, because you protected me with your love.
— Autumn Christian, We are Wormwood
Cold. Foggy cold. Soaking through fabric, biting into the skin, clutching the bones until flesh crawled.There was no moonlight, only orange, smoky lanterns, and the light made the snow glitter and turned the shadows into blood.
— Erik Tavares, House of Corruption
A woman that you find different or strange, or whom you may envy or covet is deemed by you all to be a witch! Anything that you do not understand, you deem witchcraft!
— Andrea Zuvich, The Stuart Vampire
A figure held his daughter in the rocker. In the dim light he couldn’t make out the features, but the sight of anyone he didn’t know sitting in Wendy’s rocker with their daughter was enough to scare the shit out of him. Judging by the shuddering movements of his daughter’s body it had frightened her too, had caused her to mewl. He wanted to charge forward and reclaim his daughter, but he didn’t know what would happen if he acted so quickly. What would he do if it hurt her? What would he do if it killed her? “What-what do you want? I’ll do anything just don’t take my daughter. She’s…all I have left.”The figure stopped rocking and slowly eased its way to its feet. There’s not much light in the room but as it moved closer to the bed and it settled the baby in her crib, he saw just enough of her face in the moonlight.“Wendy?” His voice is as full of horror as it is with awe. He can’t help but be horrified at the sight of her now, the way that death has changed her, making her a terrible figure indeed. Her eyes are strange; some depth, some dark and terrible nothing has swallowed up all of her light, and in this first moment he swears he can feel the awful cold of that operating room coming off of her flesh. She is so small and so hard to look at, as if his mind can’t quite focus on her form. Through the bars of the crib he can see her anger and hear the terrible, alien sound of her hiss. “What do you want?”She doesn’t answer him, staring cold and blank through those stark white bars, and then she was scrambling toward him across the floor, making him press flat against the wall to get away from her skittering shape.
— Amanda M. Lyons, Wendy Won't Go
There she was, up on that bed pushing and pushing just as they’d practiced. She was dilated and the tension had been building to this moment all day. He had never been so glad to be a writer. It meant that he could be here and he could be at home, helping her as much as he liked after the baby was born. Wendy was sweating and bleary-eyed, focusing so very hard on the movement of her baby down the birth canal that it took her a moment to hear what anyone said to her. The pain was clearly unimaginable and he wished he could have taken some of it from her, but she’d insisted on a natural birth and that’s just what she was doing.“Are you okay, Babe?” She’d grown extra quiet in the last few moments, tension lines growing deeper in her face, her hands clawing at the bed rails as she pushed. She was trying so hard to endure and to get through that he had to ask again. “Are you okay?”She looked at him from the bed with all the nurses and the doctor flitting about the room watching her vital signs, monitoring the baby’s heart rate and her own and of course, guiding the course of the birth itself. She said something he barely heard. “No, no something is…”and then they all knew.
— Amanda M. Lyons, Wendy Won't Go
The easiest way to disturb or create an element of horror is to take a positive emotion and put it in a negative situation, to create dissonance.
— R.R.  Hood
Lee leaned closer to her and swore he could smell fear coming off her in waves, the way a shark smells blood in the water
— Pamela K. Kinney "Let Demon Dogs Lie " Southern Haunts Devils in the Darkness
THEY are afraid of nothing,' I grumbled, watching their approach through the window. 'Together, they would brave Satan and all his legions.
— Emily Brontë
Corpses were real. He had heard about these cannibal dead walkers in the northeast, but they were in fact real. Rumor had it that one - just one - had made its way down towards the Mid-Atlantic.The rumored Dead Walker lived.
— Laurel Coleman, The Somnambulist
But if home suddenly becomes not like home, what then?
— Kate Milford, Shadowhunters and Downworlders: A Mortal Instruments Reader
The White Hand did not fry all the brain. He fried somefrom the right hemisphere and some from the left. Theremaining brain, The White Hand wrapped in tin foil,carefully. Tomorrow is, after all, another day, and food should be keptin storage so it won’t go bad.
— Siberian Hellhole by Michael Mulvihill
The future will never bend to the fleeting hopes of the man."From "Lucifer's Ladder: God of the Fallen, Book One
— W.D. Frank
Readers love fantasy, but we need horror. Smart horror. Truthful horror. Horror that helps us make sense of a cruelly senseless world.
— Brian K. Vaughan
No one can help but stare at the monster, because horror is a cousin to awe.
— Ilsa J. Bick, Monsters
Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to exalt.
— Algernon Blackwood, The Willows
Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world… Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster.
— Stephen King, The Shining
Pictures ... flashed on her in sudden color, too much color, shocking color, the color that leaps out of black when lightning strikes at night.
— Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
You think horror enters spectacularly. It doesn't. It just prosaically turns up. Even in the first seconds you know you'll find it a room.
— Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf