c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
A spring sun was shining on the rue St. Honore, as I ran down the church steps. On one corner stood a barrow full of yellow jonquils, pale violets from the Riviera, dark Russian violets, and white Roman hyacinths in a golden cloud of mimosa. The street was full of Sunday pleasure-seekers. I swung my cane and laughed with the rest. Someone overtook and passed me. He never turned, but there was the same deadly malignity in his white profile that there had been in his eyes. I watched him as long as I could see him. His lithe back expressed the same menace; every step that carried him away from me seemed to bear him on some errand connected with my destruction.I was creeping along, my feet almost refusing to move. There began to dawn in me a sense of responsibility for something long forgotten. It began to seem as if I deserved that which he threatened: it reached a long way back - a long, long way back. It had lain dormant all these. years: it was there though, and presently it would rise and confront me. But I would try to escape; and I stumbled as best I could into the rue de Rivioli, across the Place de la Concorde and on to the Quai. I looked with sick eyes upon the sun, shining through the white foam of the fountain, pouring over the backs of the dusky bronze river-gods, on the far-away Arc, a structure of amethyst mist, on the countless vistas of grey stems and bare branches faintly green. Then I saw him again coming down one of the chestnut alleys of the Cours la Reine.("In The Court of the Dragon")
— Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories
He who fears being watched from the abysswill be unable to look into it himself.The truth can only be obtained by pressing forward.
— Sadamu Yamashita, Silent Hill 2: The Novel
The sleepless hum of the city was abidingly in his ears, and the lamps that dotted the misty pavements stared at him blinkingly all along the route. The tall black buildings rose up grimly into the night; the faces that flitted to and fro along the pavements, kept ever sliding past him, melting into the darkness; and the cabs and 'buses, still astir in the streets, had a ghostly air as they vanished in the gloom.("An Unexpected Journey")
— J.H. Pearce, Tales from a Gas-Lit Graveyard
I wanted to explore this idea that the bogey man in the closet is scary, but being a mother is scarier.
— Joe Hill
As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of what my architect's books say about the custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabe, and whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian church, might have entered undetected, and taken possession of the west gallery. I had read of such things happening too, but not in works on architecture.("In The Court Of The Dragon")
— Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories
My name is Patricia Lauren Bordeaux, and I, like my creator before me, am a very lonely vampire.
— S.C. Parris, A Night of Frivolity
His voice was oily and slick as it poured from his mouth like liquid acid, threatening to hook onto the woman's hair like a fishing hook and drag her back to death.
— Stephen   Craig, Blooded Eyes - A Short Story
He stood just near the club’s steps, his back to me along the foggy English night, and it was not until I’d passed him and began my ascent of the many steps that I’d heard his voice. The voice I knew, in all my years of living upon the Earth, that I would never forget. Even then I had known this. It was the slippery way of his tongue, or perhaps it was the coolness of which his words passed across the air and slid its way into my ears as though they were only meant for me.
— S.C. Parris, A Night of Frivolity
With heightened senses it remained motionless and looked through bulbous eyes. It could taste fear in the air. Pheromones. Sweat. Food was near, but more importantly, so was its new home.
— Stephen   Craig, Symbiote
Tell me, Eric,” he said, licking a droplet from the corner of his mouth. “Have you ever tasted blood?”       My mouth was so dry I could barely find the voice to answer him. “What an odd question...”       “But a valid one. Well, have you?”       “I’ve cut my lip before, so yes, I suppose I have tasted blood, but...”       “Not your own, you foolish boy.” He let out a short, derisive laugh and leaned in so that he was only a few inches from my face. “I mean the blood of another.”       “Good God, Stefan, of course not!”       “Pity...
— Melika Dannese Lux, Corcitura
Ask yourself what a man without guile might do to your body in the dark.
— Nenia Campbell, Terrorscape
Bodies lay strewn all around. Turkish and Wallachian warriors caught up in the intimate indiscriminate embrace of death.
— Shane K.P. O'Neill, Bound By Blood: Volume 1 (Bound By Blood, #1)
Don't tell me it's going to fucking be okay! I am not okay with being that fucker's pinata!
— Nenia Campbell, Terrorscape
You presume to name those who have no name. We are pandemonium and disaster. We are the dancing, gibbering horror of the world.
— Brenna Yovanoff, The Replacement
When I first read Lovecraft around 1971, and even more so when I began to read about his life, I immediately knew that I wanted to write horror stories. I had read Arthur Machen before I read Lovecraft, and I didn’t have that reaction at all. It was what I sensed in Lovecraft’s works and what I learned about his myth as the “recluse of Providence” that made me think, “That’s for me!” I already had a grim view of existence, so there was no problem there. I was and am agoraphobic, so being reclusive was a snap. The only challenge was whether or not I could actually write horror stories. So I studied fiction writing and wrote every day for years and years until I started to get my stories accepted by small press magazines. I’m not comparing myself to Lovecraft as a person or as a writer, but the rough outline of his life gave me something to aspire to. I don’t know what would have become of me if I hadn’t discovered Lovecraft.
— Thomas Ligotti
These were the things we would never notice were missing.
— Kate Chisman, Creep
A kiss is such an amazing thing -- So simple, so complex. The only human act that gives while it receives. Mouth to mouth, it almost seems the eating of one another. Maybe that’s all we are, food for each other. Why, I believe there’s a poem in there somewhere. Another kiss to inspire my muse, Desirée, and I’ll tell you something else you don’t know.
— Kenneth C. Goldman, Desiree
The diamonds glinted under the glare of the chandelier and they looked like a thousand spider eyes
— Kate Chisman, Creep
The impulse came to her clairvoyantly, and she obeyed without a sign of hesitation. Deeper comprehension would come to her of the whole awful puzzle. And come it did, yet not in the way she imagined and expected.
— Algernon Blackwood, The Man Whom the Trees Loved
Do not wander in the deeps,Where the Shriker's shadow creeps.When he rises from beneath,Beware the Sharpness of his teeth.
— Janet Lee Carey, The Beast of Noor
Goodreads.com is actually about fiction not dreading goo. But I have a profile there, anyway...
— Michael A. Arnzen
What is a monster? Something that grows hair all over and howls? Could be. But the real monster is within, and when it comes out, it’s as fugly as you see it, or as it lets you see it.
— John Vamvas Olga Montes, WHEREWOLVES
Last night they came again. The soldiers had set up a defense perimeter, but there were simply too many—they must have come by the hundreds of thousands, a huge swarm that blotted out the stars. Three soldiers killed, as well as Cole. He was standing right in front of me; they actually lifted him off his feet before they bored through him like hot knives through butter. There was barely enough of him left to bury.
— Justin Cronin, The Passage
If there's one thing Robert had learned in three weeks at Lovecraft Middle School, it's that nothing was impossible.
— Charles Gilman, Professor Gargoyle
My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mother's horror, and he'd clap for trees that he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the fall.
— Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes
The chandelier was wearing on its rubber support and the crack at the side of the ceiling hold was getting bigger. “One day that’s going to fall on us and spear you through the heart,” he said. I turned to kiss him on the shoulder and closed my eyes.
— Kate Chisman, Creep
It was like some mad scientist threw a bunch of DNA into a blender and this is what came out. What the heck could it be? Was it some kind of alien? A scientific experiment gone horribly wrong? Did we have a Dr. Frankenstein living in Billings? Seriously, the creature looked like a resurrected Wookiee made from spare parts.
— Kendra C. Highley, Matt Archer: Monster Hunter
Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!
— Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Ponkapog Papers, a Sea Turn, and Other Matters
In the dark behind the glare of the television, like a mannequin behind it, I could see a silhouette and it wasn’t moving. It was maybe six foot high with its shoulders hunched and I blinked to make sure it was real. The TV fuzzed grey and white and black and I had a lump in my throat that I couldn’t swallow away. “Rory” I whispered. Clawing out gently beneath the duvet cover, reaching for his hand. But I couldn’t find it. And he didn’t answer.
— Kate Chisman, Creep
From the short story (and anthology containing it) DONNY DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE :Donny acted like he didn’t hear me. “You can’t send your mom off into eternity looking like that, Artie. She wouldn’t like it.” He reached into my mother’s casket, shoved his fingers into her mouth like it was the most logical thing in the world. “Donny, you can’t --!” “I’m just making her look right, Artie. It’s what she would want.” He tugged hard at my mom’s lips. I knew they were cold because I had kissed them a few moments earlier, and for a moment I felt convinced my friend had completely lost his mind. But when I looked inside Mom’s casket I knew Donny had done something only a best friend would think to do. My mother was smiling again. And she looked just the way I remembered her, the way I would always want to remember her. I got so choked up I couldn’t talk for a few minutes.  Finally I managed, “My mother always told me you could make her smile.
— Kenneth C. Goldman, Donny Doesn't Live Here Anymore
The scratching came from the attic. At night, when Rory turned out the light I would lie awake and wait for it to skit, skit, skit lightly across the floorboards above our heads and down behind the water pipes.
— Kate Chisman, Creep
From "Lady In Waiting" in the anthology The Morgue :Now I have yet to meet the corpse could hold up its end of a conversation, so at most I might whistle while fixin’ one up ‘stead of engagin’ myself in any small talk that’s goin’ to be so one-sided anyways. But Cindy Flowers’ corpse weren’t no ordinary body when it walked upright, and it sure weren’t ordinary just because it was lyin’ before me in a pine wood box. So for the first time I felt the need to get a few things said to one of our visitors, and I leaned down to get myself real close to her face. Her eyes was closed ‘cause Pa had already sewed her lids shut.
— Kenneth C. Goldman, The Morgue: An Anthology
From "Lunchtime At The Justice Cafe" :The waitress snarled a grin that lasted just long enough to show a mouthful of stained yellowed teeth, then turned suddenly serious. “‘Course I’m not the one to talk about these folks, I ‘spose. You see, I used to do a bit of eavesdroppin’ in my day before the sheriff put a stop to that.”   She lifted the stringy blond hair from the side of her face, the opposite side from where she had hidden her pencil. There was a small hole about the size of a quarter where her ear should have been. “As you can see, Mr. McAllister, Sheriff Sweet puts a fairly high price on mindin’ your own business in Justice,” she added, refilling his cup. “You want some pie?”  
— Kenneth C. Goldman, Fried! Fast Food, Slow Deaths
Run, sweetheart, run.
— Rae Hachton, Frankie's Monster
Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it.
— Rick Yancey, The Curse of the Wendigo
The preface? Why would he waste time with the preface? Skip the preface and move on to the meat of the thing!
— Kenneth Oppel, This Dark Endeavor
The book the snowman was the best book I have ever read it had suspence durring the whole book it was AWSOME!!!
— R.L. Stine, The Snowman
There’s an idea that hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition.
— Stephen King
As soon as reality breaks, as soon as we're separated from the phsical world, the cracks begin to appear in our minds. And through them seeps the madness that has always been there, flowing into your skull like a liquid nightmare ..
— Alexander Gordon Smith
Pack up all my care and woe, blackbird, bye-bye
— Stephen King, Insomnia
I've never wanted a heart as much as I want yours.
— Rae Hachton, Frankie's Monster
Violet carved her hate into her flesh one name at a time.
— Damien Angelica Walters, Fireside Magazine, Summer 2012
I tried to say something cool, wound up stammering something like, “WANNA YOU WANNA WEENIE ME?” The end kind of trailed off in a shrill, choking warble.
— David Wong, John Dies at the End
When I am perfect, I will be allowed to leave.
— Damien Angelica Walters, Electric Velocipede 25
I'm sixteen with what I hope will be a long life ahead, but I'm willing to give it up, to give anything to let her live, to let her make it through the night.
— Travis Thrasher
The stink of rot and ruin, of old dreams, broken screams, and wicked, dirty little things.
— Damien Angelica Walters, Ink
As a writer, I will go down any dark alley, inch my way through the tightest crawl space, and feed on your every fear. I will take your sense of calm and tear it to shreds. - Horror Author Barbara Watkins
— Barbara Watkins, Hollowing Screams
so this is my collection of human body parts, Dr. Silkston," he said proudly, walking into the storeroom. "each organ is here fro a reason, a purpose. you see this one," he said, pointing to a cylinder containing what appeared to Thomas to be a section of a small intestine with a hole in it. "'Tis a duelist's jejunum. that is the bullet hole, right through the middle. and this, this is the Marquis of Rockingham's heart," he announced proudly. " he gave me a permission to have it a fore he died
— Tessa Harris, The Dead Shall Not Rest
She had gone through the veil and returned to Earth. But the veil only opens one way.
— S.K.N. Hammerstone, The Rift
It was the kind of scream that would be in a horror movie right before someone got chopped up into little bitty pieces.
— Missy Lyons, Alien Promise
I don't know where we are, but we'll soon find our way home!" Le avventure di Pinocchio
— Nancy B. Brewer, Garnet
It feels as though Tony's a ghost, a wisp of someone I once loved, or never loved at all and thought was someone else. I don't feel anything, not even when he fucks me. I wonder if he knows. I wonder if he believes I still want him. I always tell myself it's the last time, but I don't leave. i exist instead inside this shell of a life we've created.
— Sandy DeLuca, Manhattan Grimoire
This is another dream, isn't it?""Perceive it as you like. I've been trying to tell you things, but you're allowing the dark things-him-to invade your thoughts and feelings.
— Sandy DeLuca, Manhattan Grimoire
There are some beliefs and places in this city that are incomprehensible to some-hell-to most, and it's best to leave them alone.
— Sandy DeLuca, Manhattan Grimoire
Be safe on this wicked night.
— Sandy DeLuca, Manhattan Grimoire
They’ve made her something else now.
— Damien Angelica Walters, They Make of You a Monster
He fills me with horror and I do not hate him. How can I hate him, Raoul? Think of Erik at my feet, in the house on the lake, underground. He accuses himself, he curses himself, he implores my forgiveness!...He confesses his cheat. He loves me! He lays at my feet an immense and tragic love. ... He has carried me off for love!...He has imprisoned me with him, underground, for love!...But he respects me: he crawls, he moans, he weeps!...And, when I stood up, Raoul, and told him that I could only despise him if he did not, then and there, give me my liberty...he offered it...he offered to show me the mysterious road...Only...only he rose too...and I was made to remember that, though he was not an angel, nor a ghost, nor a genius, he remained the voice...for he sang. And I listened ... and stayed!...That night, we did not exchange another word. He sang me to sleep.
— Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.
— J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
A man chooses...a slave obeys.
— Andrew Ryan
It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it
—  from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.
It doesn't make you a monster to want, she said, her voice very gentle. It's what you do with it that matters.
— Jim Butcher, Side Jobs: Stories from the Dresden Files
Hello, Kanta. They're saying interesting things about you on the news," she said. "I wondered if you'd survived.""He didn't," I said. "I killed him."Silence."I killed Mkhai, too," I said. "Tens of thousands of years, gone in the blink of an eye.""Why are you telling me this?" asked the voice."Because you're next," I said. "I'm the demon slayer. Come and get me.
— Dan Wells, Mr. Monster
It had been a bad trip ... fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz' final words from the heart of darkness: "The horror! The horror! ... Exterminate all the brutes!
— Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
Her face was a grimace of surprised pain as she slid unconscious down the back of the tub and under the water. I held her under for several minutes after the blow, watching as the water went pink, then red, and finally crimson with blood.
— Alistair Cross, Beautiful Monster
There's wickedness, dark as night. There are things that are wicked and if you touch them, they know you. They know where to find you now. - Knock Knock
— S.P. Miskowski
The girl's face was the color of talcum. Her uncle's was a death mask, a bone structure overlaid by parchment. Shane's was granite, with a glistening line of sweat just below his hair line. He'd never forget this night, the detective knew, no matter what else happened for the rest of his life. They were all getting scars on their souls, the sort of scars people got in the Dark Ages, when they believed in devils and black magic. ("Speak To Me Of Death")
— Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich
Blood began to flow, at first cautiously, as if embarrassed by its appearance; a few thin red lines exploring the gravitational trajectory of its new terrain. Now it flowed faster, steadily staining her pale flesh a horrific red.
— R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room
His eyes burned with intensity. I wondered briefly if someonehe knew was being held in that cold room that smelled like death. Someone he loved?
— Jaye Wells, Red-Headed Stepchild
The thing, whatever it was - and no one was ever sure afterwards whether it was a dream or a fit or what - happened at that peculiar hour before dawn when human vitality is at its lowest ebb. The Blue Hour they sometimes call it, l'heure bleue - the ribbon of darkness between the false dawn and the true, always blacker than all the rest of the night has been before it. Criminals break down and confess at that hour; suicides nerve themselves for their attempts; mists swirl in the sky; and - according to the old books of the monks and the hermits - strange, unholy shapes brood over the sleeping rooftops.At any rate, it was at this hour that her screams shattered the stillness of that top-floor apartment overlooking the Pare Monceau. Curdling, razor-edged screams that slashed through the thick bedroom door. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")
— Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich
Only I was capable of saving her now, and that, as far as anyone could argue, may have made me worse than all the devils and the demons, but it also, more accurately, made me better than all the angels and gods.
— Alistair Cross, Beautiful Monster
And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from these globules themselves as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvae so bloodless and so hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water - things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each other - forms like nought ever beheld by the naked eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary command against all evil beings. ("The House And The Brain")
— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Reign of Terror Volume 2: Great Victorian Horror Stories
The minister paused in his narrative. At that moment there came a tremendous blast of wind which shook the windows of the manse, and burst open the hall door, and caused the candles to flicker and the fire to go roaring up the chimney. It is not too much to say that, what with the uncanny story, and the howling storm, we all felt that creeping sort of uneasiness which so often seems like the touch of something from another world - a hand stretched across the boundary-line of time and eternity, the coldness and mystery of which make the stoutest heart tremble. ("Sandy The Tinker")
— Charlotte Riddell, The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies
Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories - most included in this volume - which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller part of his vision could be seen as "mysteries." For Woolrich it all was fantastic; the clock in the tower, hand in the glove, out of control vehicle, errant gunshot which destroyed; whether destructive coincidence was masked in the "naturalistic" or the "incredible" was all pretty much the same to him. RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK, THE BRIDE WORE BLACK, NIGHTMARE are all great swollen dreams, turgid constructions of the night, obsession and grotesque outcome; to turn from these to the "fantastic" was not to turn at all. The work, as is usually the case with a major writer was perfectly formed, perfectly consistent, the vision leached into every area and pulled the book together. "Jane Brown's Body" is a suspense story. THE BRIDE WORE BLACK is science fiction. PHANTOM LADY is a gothic. RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK was a bildungsroman. It does not matter.
— Barry N. Malzberg, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich
The dead are the past and we cannot escape the past. Without the past there will be no future.
— M.R. Gott, Where The Dead Fear to Tread
He handed me something done up in paper. 'Your mask,' he said. 'Don't put it on until we get past the city-limits.' It was a frightening-looking thing when I did so. It was not a mask but a hood for the entire head, canvas and cardboard, chalk-white to simulate a skull, with deep black hollows for the eyes and grinning teeth for the mouth. The private highway, as we neared the house, was lined on both sides with parked cars. I counted fifteen of them as we bashed by; and there must have been as many more ahead, in the other direction. We drew up and he and I got out. I glanced in cautiously over my shoulder at the driver as we went by, to see if I could see his face, but he too had donned one of the death-masks.'Never do that,' the Messenger warned me in a low voice. 'Never try to penetrate any other member's disguise.' The house was as silent and lifeless as the last time - on the outside. Within it was a horrid, crawling charnel-house alive with skull-headed figures, their bodies encased in business-suits, tuxedos, and evening dresses. The lights were all dyed a ghastly green or ghostly blue, by means of colored tissue-paper sheathed around them. A group of masked musicians kept playing the Funeral March over and over, with brief pauses in between. A coffin stood in the center of the main living-room. I was drenched with sweat under my own mask and sick almost to death, even this early in the game.At last the Book-keeper, unmasked, appeared in their midst.Behind him came the Messenger. The dead-head guests all applauded enthusiastically and gathered around them in a ring.Those in other rooms came in. The musicians stopped the Death Match. The Book-keeper bowed, smiled graciously. 'Good evening, fellow corpses,' was his chill greeting. 'We are gathered together to witness the induction of our newest member.' There was an electric tension. 'Brother Bud!' His voice rang out like a clarion in the silence. 'Step forward.' ("Graves For Living")
— Cornell Woolrich
The car drives through, stops while the man closes and fastens the prickly gate behind it. The bell shuts off; the stillness is deafening by contrast. The car goes on until the outline of a house suddenly uptilts the searching headlight-beams, log-built, sprawling, resembling a hunting-lodge. But there's no friendliness to it. There is something ominous and forbidding about its look, so dark, so forgotten, so secretive-looking. The kind of a house that has a maw to swallow with - a one-way house, that you feel will never disgorge any living thing that enters it. Leprous in the moonlight festering on its roof. And the two round sworls of light played by the heads of the car against its side, intersecting, form a pear-shaped oval that resembles a gleaming skull. ("Jane Brown's Body")
— Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich
The glove comes off, flops loosely over, and there's suddenly horror beating into his brain, smashing, pounding, battering. He reels a little in his chair, has to hold onto the edge of the table with both hands, at the impact of it.A clawlike thing - two of the finger extremities already bare of flesh as far as the second joint; two more with only shriveled, bloodless, rotting remnants of it adhering, only the thumb intact, and that already unhealthy-looking, flabby. A dead hand - the hand of a skeleton - on a still-living body. A body he was dancing with only a few minutes ago.A rank odor, a smell of decay, of the grave and of the tomb, hovers about the two of them now.A woman points from the next table, screams. She's seen it, too. She hides her face, cowers against her companion's shoulder, shudders. Then he sees it too. His collar's suddenly too tight for him.Others see it, one by one. A wave of impalpable horror spreads centrifugally from that thing lying there in the blazing electric light on O'Shaughnessy's table. The skeleton at the feast! ("Jane Brown's Body")
— Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich
Henry,' at last said one, again dipping the spoon into the flaming spirit, 'hast thou read Hoffman?''I should think so,' said Henry.'What think you of him?''Why, that he writes admirably; and, moreover, what is more admirable - in such a manner that you see at once he almost believes that which he relates. As for me, I know very well that when I read him of a dark night, I am obliged to creep to bed without shutting my book, and without daring to look behind me.''Indeed; then you love the terrible and fantastic?''I do,' said Henry. ("The Dead Man's Story
— James Hain Friswell
I really, really need some help and advice. I'm scared... I'm scared of my own home, of my own daughter!
— Meinos Kaen, Proud Parents Blog
You’d have been scared too if that big troglodyte had put his hands on you. He smelled like dirty socks and store brand cola.” Chet Andrews
— Aaron Crabill, The Society:  Conspiracy
This whole goddamn house stinks of ghosts.
— J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
So I suggest you stick close, pay attention, and avoid breaking the Terrorverse's only commandment: Thou shall not be stupid.
— Seth Grahame-Smith, How to Survive a Horror Movie
Our little tribal circles, bound by social contracts and selfish mutual need. Everyone working in their own greedy self-interests and huddling together with their tribe, at war with all those outside who they regard as barely human. What breaks a human mind out of that iron cage of mistrust, is a sacrifice. The martyr who gives up everything, who abandons all personal gain, who lays down his life for the good of those outside his group. He becomes a symbol all can rally around. So instead of trying to make a selfish, violent primate somehow empathize with the whole world, which is impossible, you only need to get him to remember and love the martyr. As one is forgotten, another must replace it.
— David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It
To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death.
— Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of Mystery and Imagination
From this moment on, nothing is what it seems. You're not a human being, you're a character- and filmmakers are doing everything in their power to kill you even now. Supernatural powers and curses are real, and numbers like 666 and 237 can kill you just as easily as a butch knife.Log cabins are slaughterhouses, cornstalks are antennas for evil, and aliens never, ever come in peace.
— Seth Grahame-Smith, How to Survive a Horror Movie
In the real world, babysitting is a groovy way for young people to learn responsibility (and earn a little pocket money). In the Terrorverse, it's a plot device used to kill teenagers.
— Seth Grahame-Smith, How to Survive a Horror Movie
As McMasters raised the shotgun, the man removed his glasses. There were fields of stars where his eyes should have been. But they weren’t reflections of the night sky. These stars were a glimpse of a dim and distant future where the very laws of physics had been reduced to relics of a forgotten age. Feeble as dying embers, they were the palsied mourners at time’s wake.McMasters could hear the ultimate silence and feel the biting cold of the one true void. The promise of the eternal nothing beckoned to him. There was a sort of peace in the death it represented, not the death of mind and body but of shape and form. It was the final revelation, the casting off of life’s illusion in favor of the void’s embrace. from "Riders of the Necronomicon
— James  Pratt
Thanks, but no thanks. I need my makeup honey. - Carol
— Matthew Leeth
At this point, a few words on this term 'horror' are perhaps called for. Some amateurs of this kind of literature engage in endless hairsplitting disputes, centered around this word and its close companion 'terror', as to which' stories may so be categorized and which may not, and whether or not descriptions such as weird or fantasy or macabre are preferable. The designation 'horror', with its connotations of revulsion, satisfies me no more than it does the purists but I believe that it is the only term which embraces all the stories in this collection and which succinctly suggests to the majority of readers what is in store for them. Horror then, in this instance, covers tales of the Supernatural and of physical terror, of ghosts and necromancy and of inhuman violence and all the dark corners and crevices of human belief and behavior that lie in between. ("An Age In Horror" - introduction)
— Michel Parry, Reign of Terror
One day you see a man walking down the road, the next day you come to his yard and find him dead... Why is it that he cannot do what the living do? It is because the thing that gave power to these parts is no longer there. That is the duppy, and that is the most powerful part of any man. Everybody has evil in them, and when a man is alive... he will not abandon himself to many evil things. But when the duppy leaves the body, it no longer has anything to restrain it and it will do more terrible things than any man ever dreamed of.- From 'Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica', Zora Neale Hurston, 1938
— Charles A. Cornell
Our house was an old Tudor mansion. My father was very particular in keeping the smallest peculiarities of his home unaltered. Thus the many peaks and gables, the numerous turrets, and the mullioned windows with their quaint lozenge panes set in lead, remained very nearly as they had been three centuries back. Over and above the quaint melancholy of our dwelling, with the deep woods of its park and the sullen waters of the mere, our neighborhood was thinly peopled and primitive, and the people round us were ignorant, and tenacious of ancient ideas and traditions. Thus it was a superstitious atmosphere that we children were reared in, and we heard, from our infancy, countless tales of horror, some mere fables doubtless, others legends of dark deeds of the olden time, exaggerated by credulity and the love of the marvelous. ("Horror: A True Tale")
— John Berwick Harwood, Reign of Terror Volume 2: Great Victorian Horror Stories
I shook with cold and fear, without being able to answer. After a lapse of some moments, I was again called. I made an effort to speak, and then felt the bandage which wrapped me from head to foot. It was my shroud. At last, I managed feebly to articulate, 'Who calls?''Tis I' said a voice.'Who art thou?''I! I! I!' was the answer; and the voice grew weaker, as if it was lost in the distance; or as if it was but the icy rustle of the trees.A third time my name sounded on my ears; but now it seemed to run from tree to tree, as if it whistled in each dead branch; so that the entire cemetery repeated it with a dull sound. Then I heard a noise of wings, as if my name, pronounced in the silence, had suddenly awakened a troop of nightbirds. My hands, as if by some mysterious power, sought my face. In silence I undid the shroud which bound me, and tried to see. It seemed as if I had awakened from a long sleep. I was cold.I then recalled the dread fear which oppressed me, and the mournful images by which I was surrounded. The trees had no longer any leaves upon them, and seemed to stretch forth their bare branches like huge spectres! A single ray of moonlight which shone forth, showed me a long row of tombs, forming an horizon around me, and seeming like the steps which might lead to Heaven. All the vague voices of the night, which seemed to preside at my awakening, were full of terror. ("The Dead Man's Story")
— James Hain Friswell
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of being well-preserved, but to skid sideways, chocolate in one hand, wine in the other, still screaming, 'Whoo what a ride!
— Theresa Hollis
I’m getting the feeling that you two don’t like me. - Kristy
— Matthew Leeth
No wonder that the ghost and goblin stories had a new zest. No wonder that the blood of the more timid grew chill and curdled, that their flesh crept, and their hearts beat irregularly, and the girls peeped fearfully over their shoulders, and huddled close together like frightened sheep, and half-fancied they beheld some impish and malignant face gibbering at them from the darkling corners of the old room. By degrees my high spirits died out, and I felt the childish tremors, long latent, long forgotten, coming over me. I followed each story with painful interest; I did not ask myself if I believed the dismal tales. I listened and fear grew upon me - the blind, irrational fear of our nursery days. ("Horror: A True Tale")
— John Berwick Harwood, Reign of Terror Volume 2: Great Victorian Horror Stories
Shall I compare thee to a Shoggoth?
— D.R. O'Brien, Shakespeare vs. Lovecraft: A Horror Comedy Mash-Up featuring Shakespeare's Characters and Lovecraft's Creatures
I live in different worlds. One world where I perform my duty as a part of society. My favorite is my world. The writing's world.
— Ria Tumimomor, My Unofficial Pet: Brownie the First Generation
If you let something scare you to death, then the worst has happened.
— D.E. Athkins, The Ripper
I’ve been thinking that you, me and Kristy should all have a sleepover or something like that. Wouldn‘t that be so cool! - Carol
— Matthew Leeth
You’re forgetting… we never get in trouble in that class. Remember I gave Mr. Hendry that lap dance last year. I’m thinking he’s expecting one this year as well. - Carol
— Matthew Leeth
This is indeed one of the true tragedies of lycanthropy, that the subject of such evil pacts and nefarious deeds is ignorant of his place in the plot that besieges this humble hamlet.”– Aleister Creed, WitchfinderThe Trial of John Goode by Gabriel Salmon and Thome Ward
— Gabriel Salmon, The Trial of John Goode
And I'm thinking about the old man. He'll be pounding on the glass right about now... or maybe not now. Maybe in a while. But he'll be pounding and... will there be blood? I like to imagine so. Yes, I rather think there will be blood. Lots of blood. Blood in extraordinary quantities.
— Alan Moore
Alex: "You asked earlier why us humans fear death. I suppose it is the unknown - not knowing what awaits on the other side. But now I know, and I still fear it."The Darkness: "?"Alex: "But now I fear the living - in fact, I now fear life more than death!
— Scott Beadle, Among the Fallen: Restless Dreams
Bang bang bang. I understand now why so many horror movies use that device-the mysterious knock on the door-because it has the weight of a nightmare. You don't know what's out there, yet you know you'll open it. You'll think what I think: No one bad ever knocks.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.
— Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them. Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow's width away.
— Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
The questions push me further into the space in between, the place where my madness lays waiting for me. I struggle with each question, determined to extract some sort of answer, an explanation for everything that has happened so far. But no answers come and I’m forced to acknowledge the feeling lodged between my two worldsTerror.
— Christine Fonseca, Transcend
I have no use for your body, for within its youth lies a rotten wench already deceased.
— Keisha Keenleyside
Right at this moment, I only want silence. I believe that the end of life is silence in the love people have for you. I've actually been running through what people have said about the end. Religion says that the end is one thing, because it serves their purpose. But great thinkers alike haven't always agreed. Shakespeare knew how to say it better than anyone else. Hamlet says 'The rest is silence.' And when you think of the noises of everyday life, you realize how particularly desirable that is. Silence.
— Vincent Price
Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!
— H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
Julian tried to keep a pleasant smile on his face, though already it felt strained. He was uncomfortable with people who used the word blessed as a part of their everyday speech. The implication was that God was intervening in the minutiae of their lives, hanging around and helping them with their jobs or children or household chores as though He had nothing better to do. Maybe it was true, Julian thought wryly. Maybe that was why there were wars and murders and earthquakes and hurricanes. God was too busy helping real estate agents find new listings to deal with those other issues.
— Bentley Little, The Haunted
Do you know what it’s like to kill a man? You just pushed a knife into living, moving skin and you realize you pierced a heart that beats against your sharp knife.-Lucas Tyrel
— L'Poni Baldwin, Dragons and Cicadas: The Society On Da Run
I can see your dirtypillows.
— Stephen King
You’re just spooked. It’s Halloween
—  we’re all kind of spooked. That’s just the way it is. - Tory
Who knew death could lead to an eating disorder?
— Corey Redekop, Husk
Allow the power to flow through you. Don’t try to capture it. You wish only to borrow it.
— G.G. Collins
It was Stevenson, I think, who most notably that there are some places that simply demand a story should be told of them. ...After all, perhaps Stevenson had only half of the matter. It is true there are places which stir the mind to think that a story must be told about them. But there are also, I believe, places which have their story stored already, and want to tell this to us, through whatever powers they can; through our legends and lore, through our rumors, and our rites. By its whispering fields and its murmuring waters, by the wailing of its winds and the groaning of its stones, by what it chants in darkness and the songs it sings in light, each place must reach out to us, to tell us, tell us what it holds. ("The Axholme Toll")
— Mark Valentine, Best New Horror 21
Welcome to the house of Gray and Graves where we never lie still and death is only the beginning ...
— C.M. Stunich
Don’t get all gothic and emo on me now. - Tory
— Matthew Leeth
Behind everyday reality, there is a deeper reality so cruel that it condemns to death those who crime is no greater than the pursuit of their own curiosity.("Shem-El-Nessim: An Inspiration In Perfume")
— Chris Bell
The door of the judge's house was opened to him by a huge, bearded man who informed the reporter in a conversational tone that if he did not leave the village immediately he would not leave it with his arms unbroken.
— Phil Rickman, Candlenight
I can smell your blood now. I can smell it in every room of the house.
— Jolie du Pre, Litria
If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment-still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I've drunk it all!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Sparks are warm while they last.
— Susan Price, Ghost Song
I’m not a big fan of Halloween. Except for the dressing up part. I love picking out a costume. - Tory
— Matthew Leeth
Evan had heard it all before. A paradise underground, made for things like the worm in front of him. A place where Evan would forget he had ever been human, forget he had a mother, maybe even forget his own name. This thing did not remember its own, Evan was sure of it.
— Mary G. Thompson, Wuftoom
The wolf turned to Rachel. She was afraid to run, afraid fleeing would make it chase her. Somewhere in the stored files of her mind, she remembered one should not look directly at a menacing dog, but she couldn’t take her eyes from it.
— G.G. Collins
Fresh is best.
— Die Booth, Re-Vamp
But it bothers you. It pisse you off that I'm not crippled with debt or saddled with some moody bitch. Instead, you PR your lives and act like I'm supposed to ency you.....
— Adam Neville
The other dark places,' Evan whispered. Visions of tunnels of earth and stone, caves and streams entered his head. It was far beneath them. He knew it was real and it was down there, waiting.
— Mary G. Thompson, Wuftoom
There was nothing physical she could do to stop Mario from carrying out whatever he wished. She shivered at the thought of what that sleazy, other world leftover might do should she launch an attack on him.
— G.G. Collins
Host: For those of you just tuning in, our guests tonight are the amazing Murder Magician, and his lovely minion, The Assistant...Assistant: Charmed, I'm sureHost: Who recently killed The Rumor. And you were awarded the Oppenheimer prize for villainy at last week's annual summit for dastardly deeds-- what are you going to do with all that money?Murder Magician: Well, I'm so glad you asked that-- because I spent all the money on this giant MURDERBOT, and I've been dying to show it off!Assistant: It's true... every penny.Host: Wow! That's impressive! So what does it do?Murder Magician: Well, Mr. Clark... it murders people.Laughter.Murder Magician: I'm serious.Assistant: He is.
— Gerard Way, The Umbrella Academy, Vol. 1: The Apocalypse Suite
Now the screams were awful to hear as men burned like candles all along the deck. Black smoke billowed over the sea. Argurios could not believe what he was watching. At least fifty helpless men were dying in agony. One man managed to free himself and leap into the sea. Amazingly, when he surfaced the flames were still consuming him.All along the beach there was silence as the stunned crowd watched the magical fires burning the galley and it's crew.
— David Gemmell
Hey, Tracy you army brat, I think it’s for you!
— Mark Mackey, Summer Aldens
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
— Euripides, The Bacchae
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
— C.G. Jung
Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.
— John Steinbeck
Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.
— Aristotle
Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.
— Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the wrong. Sometime in life you will have been all of these.
— Lloyd Shearer, Walter Scott's Personality Parade
So, why do you write these strong female characters?Because you’re still asking me that ques
— Joss Whedon
More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.
— Madeleine L'Engle
How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?
— Robert Frost
I know you despise me; allow me to say, it is because you do not understand me.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.
— Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
There’s nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead