Horror Quotes

“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

“Here is a list of terrible things,
The jaws of sharks, a vultures wings
The rabid bite of the dogs of war,
The voice of one who went before,
But most of all the mirror's gaze,
Which counts us out our numbered days.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“Invitation to Dance-
It’s a Dance. And sometimes they turn the lights off in this ballroom.
But we’ll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the Dark. Especially in the Dark.
May I have the pleasure?”
― Stephen King

“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“It strikes me profoundly that the world is more often than not a bad and cruel place.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Down to Earth

“Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up”
― Stephen King, It

“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

“The zombie looks like a man, walks like a man, eats and otherwise functions fully, yet is devoid of the spark. It represents the nagging doubt that lays deep in the heart of even the most zealous believer: behind all of your pretty songs and stained glass, this is what you really are. Shambling meat. Our true fear of the zombie was never that its bite would turn us into one of them. Our fear is that we are already zombies.”
― David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries. They were the men with the leather-ribbon whips who sweated up the Pyramids seasoning it with other people's salt and other people's cracked hearts. They coursed Europe on the White Horses of the Plague. They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale. Some must have been lazing clowns, foot props for emperors, princes, and epileptic popes. Then out on the road, Gypsies in time, their populations grew as the world grew, spread, and there was more delicious variety of pain to thrive on. The train put wheels under them and here they run down the log road out of the Gothic and baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of it stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe, men.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters III: 1929-1931

“Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?”
― Arundhati Roy

“I'm giving serious thought into eating yor wife” - Hannibal Lecter”
― Thomas Harris

“All fled—all done, so lift me on the pyre—

The Feast is over, and the lamps expire.”
― Robert E. Howard

“She had the human look of a domesticated animal.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh

“Seven, Richie thought. That's the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That's the way it's supposed to be.”
― Stephen King, It

“Lover," she whispers, and closes her eyes.
It falls upon her.
Love is like dying.”
― Stephen King

“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.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“Maybe the flies knew we were leaving. Maybe they were happy for us.”
― Eli Wilde, Orchard of Skeletons

“It is dark. You cannot see. Only the hint of stars out the broken window. And a voice as old as the Snake from the Garden whispers, 'I will hold your hand.”
― John Wick

“She was overwhelmed with a premonition. Deja vu but from the future, looking back to this moment looking forward.”
― William Kely McClung, Black Fire

“Staring at the wraith’s left hand, Zam saw a stump where its index finger should have been and knew then that the severed finger moving around in his pocket belonged to the wraith.”
― Frank Lambert, Xyz

“What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we're being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.”
― David Wong, This Book Is Full of Spiders

“At first, she bucked like a wild stag beneath me, and she tried to scream, but the pillow did a good job of muffling her voice.  Before long, the bucking stopped, and my wife’s corpse, blue without oxygen, appeared below me like a hideous phantom.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and the Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

“Black considered shooting him here. That idea lasted about a second. Thought about pushing the barrel through the man’s skull. That lasted a couple more.”
― William Kely McClung, Black Fire

“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

“Her hair fragrant with hints of vanilla and cinnamon, subtle enough to make him wonder if it were the spices or truly the way she smelled.”
― William Kely McClung, Black Fire

“She likes me.  I can tell.  Problem is, she won’t admit that to the boyfriends she brings over.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and the Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction

“It seemed as though he would never pull free, until he awoke one morning feeling kind of awkward, as though his hands had been lopped off by some Arabian sword during a routine druggie blackout, and in their place, pale and membranous hands that had been fit to his wrists by aliens that took him up while he slept and then brought him back down – all of it in an effort to help him move up to where he belonged in society.”
― Harvey Havel, The Odd and the Strange: A Collection of Very Short Fiction