1. “There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
2. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
3. “Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.”
― Stephen King, It
4. “Though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley”
― Alex Garland
5. “Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer–both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula
6. “I do not love men: I love what devours them.”
― André Gide, Prometheus Illbound
7. “I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho
8. “I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns
9. “Blood is really warm, it’s like drinking hot chocolate but with more screaming.”
― Ryan Mecum, Zombie Haiku: Good Poetry for Your…Brains
10. “Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.”
― Remy de Gourmont
11. “Quiet people have the loudest minds.”
― Stephen King
12. “Which is the true nightmare, the horrific dream that you have in your sleep or the dissatisfied reality that awaits you when you awake?”
― Justin Alcala
13. “Vampires, real vampires, didn’t nibble on the necks of nubile young virgins. They tore people to pieces and sucked the blood out of the chunks. ”
― David Wellington, 99 Coffins
14. “But to die as lovers may – to die together, so that they may live together.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla
15. “It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
16. “He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
17. “I’m giving serious thought into eating your wife” – Hannibal Lecter
― Thomas Harris
18. “I don’t want to die!” “Then you should never been born.”
― Christopher Pike, Black Blood
19. “The charm of horror only tempts the strong”
― Jean Lorrain
20. “God’s creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs
21. “It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula
22. “-there was something in her, something that was…pure horror. Everything you were supposed to watch out for. Heights, fire, shards of glass, snakes, Everything that his mom tried so hard to keep him safe from.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In
23. “The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (“The Medusa”)”
― Thomas Ligotti
24. “Walking out in the middle of a funeral would be, of course, bad form. So attempting to walk out on one’s own was beyond the pale.”
― Steve Hockensmith, Dawn of the Dreadfuls
25. “What looked like morning was the beginning of endless night”
― William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist
26. “On the morning of the exorcism, I stayed home from school.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts
27. “The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
28. “They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.”
― Susan Hill
29. “Write me a creature that thinks as well as a man or better than a man, but not like a man.”
― John W. Campbell Jr
30. “We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can’t avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.”
― Arthur Machen, The Terror
31. “Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.”
― Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant
32. “Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.”
― Guy de Maupassant
33. “I could hear the chaotic laughter trailing behind me. It turned the ageless trees into a menace. They loomed around me, while hiding him. The branches tore at my skin in an effort to bind me, while weeds sought to shackle my ankles, so that I could go no further. The pain they caused was minor, when I compared it to the searing inferno at my core.”
― J.D. Stroube, Caged in Darkness
34. “Death was a living creature. Death was a man tormented by his past. Death was once a human.”
― S.K.N. Hammerstone
35. “Fred said, “Man, I think he’s gonna make a fuckin’ suit of human skin, using the best parts from each of us.” “Holy crap,” said John. “He’ll be gorgeous.”
― David Wong, John Dies at the End
36. “O little one,
My little one,
Come with me,
Your life is done.
Forget the future,
Forget the past.
Life is over:
Breathe your last.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat
37. “I would die rather than live without you. I would die the same way he died. I can’t bear you to look at me the way you did. I cannot bear it if you do not love me!” -Claudia.”
― Anne Rice
38. “You’ve faced horrors in these past weeks… I don’t know which is worse. The terror you feel the first time you witness such things, or the numbness that comes after it starts to become ordinary.”
― Tasha Alexander, A Fatal Waltz
39. “There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Thing on the Doorstep
40. “I can’t imagine you give apologies, Ten had said before, and she’d been right, but Liraz thought that she would now, She would apologize for Savvath. If her voice was her own. If it wasn’t reeling out of her, rising and falling in a sound that might have been laughter and might-if she weren’t Liraz and it weren’t unthinkable-have been sobbing.
In truth, it was both. She was going to lose her arms, the clean way or the less clean, and here’s where the laughter came in: It was horrific, and it was sadistic, and it was also, literally, a dream come true.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters
41. “Behind every great hatred is a love story. For I am a man who has known and tasted love. I say “a man” because that is how I know myself. Look at me, and what do you see? Do I not take the form of a man? Do I not feel as you do, suffer as you do, love as you do, mourn as you do? What is the essence of a man, if not these things?”
― Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors
42. “The snow wasn’t deep – in many places its crust was firm enough that they actually walked on top of it – but the wind was surgical, a precision instrument with needles for teeth, and it found even the tiniest exposed places on her skin, attacking them.”
― Joe Schreiber, Red Harvest
43. “I thought it was foolish mumbo jumbo when I was alive – then I woke up dead.”
― C.V. Hunt, Danse Macabre
44. “I’ll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into – something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Thing on the Doorstep
45. “…That insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
46. “UNDERTAKER!” the head boomed. “BOY, DO I HAVE A JOB FOR YOU!”
― Tom Upton
47. “Jesus Christ-” “Is Not here right now,” the man in black replied,”and even if he were, he could not save you.”
― Brian Keene, A Gathering of Crows
48. “That done, I sank into an uneasy sleep wherein I dreamed of an assembly line of pale, bloodless girls walking down an endless dark street and moaning softly for help. Somewhere, toward the edge of my inner vision, a shadowy figure pursued them with long, beckoning arms.
Goddamn booze!
Somewhere in the midst of this ghoulish girl parade Cairncross materialized and hung a garland of garlic around my neck, glaring at me with his good eye and intoning, ‘Go and sin no more.’
Vincenzo appeared at Cairncross’ side and together they laughed insanely, then vanished in a puff of sulphurous smoke.
I made several high-minded resolutions, muttered half-heard but sincere-sounding prayers to all the recently deposed saints, thrashed and rolled clean off the bed.
I might just as well have stayed up.” ― Jeff Rice, The Night Stalker
49. “The man screamed and clawed frantically, like a drowning swimmer. The screaming filled the universe.” —Ray Bradbury, Kaleidoscope
50. “For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.” —Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher
51. “There were times when John Wade wanted to open up Kathy’s belly and crawl inside and stay there forever. He wanted to swim through her blood and climb up and down her spine and drink from her ovaries and press his guns against the firm red muscle of her heart.” —Tim O’Brien, In The Lake Of The Woods
52. “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled …” —Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
Vincent Salera
Founder @ World's Best Story™ amplifier of creativity & fun!
