Horror Quotes

“Hello Clarice...”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“We ask only to be reassured
About the noises in the cellar
And the window that should not have been open”
― T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion

“It is the sheer ugliness and banality of everyday life which turns my blood to ice and makes me cringe in terror.”
― Jean Lorrain

“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

“I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished that idea.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“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

“Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness. Even winter — the hardest season, the most implacable — dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Vampires, nothing more than cockroaches scattering in fear at the first sign of the light.”
― P.D. Alleva, The Rose Vol. 1

“My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man's.”
― John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

“If the town were a black hole, I was the helpless star being sucked into oblivion. It was an oblivion I craved.”
― J.D. Stroube, Caged in Darkness

“Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.”
― Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One

“It wasn’t that she necessarily wanted to “socialize” at the bonfire, but she wanted to broadcast to the general population that her antisocial behavior was a personal choice not a sentence to social leprosy.”
― J.D. Stroube, Caged in Darkness

“On the morning of the exorcism, I stayed home from school.”
― Paul Tremblay, A Head Full of Ghosts

“You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison."

What monsters may they be?"

Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that there are things much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky... In these our sight plunges quite beyond any twinkler we have yet visited. Those deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alone the human body! and think of the side caverns and secondary abysses to right and left as you pass on!...

There is a size at which dignity begins," he exclaimed; "further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying that those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a new horror?”
― Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower

“Death's gruesome face taunts:
soulless eyes, crimson grimace.
I really hate clowns.”
― Katherine Applegate

“Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“Maybe this isn't home, nor ever was- maybe home is where I have to go tonight. Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark.”
― Stephen King, It

“And I thought:History is like a horror story.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Amulet

“...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

“Of course real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“If the world itself is a horror then there is nothing to fix and the only thing you could be protected from would be the contemplation of it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.”
― Joe Hill, NOS4A2

“You can get used to horror, he thought. When it has lost immediacy and is no longer pungent and has become a steady diet. When it has degraded to a chain of mind-numbing events. (“Lover When You're Near Me”)”
― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“Death was a living creature. Death was a man tormented by his past. Death was once a human.”
― S.K.N. Hammerstone

“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

“He’d wormed his way into Justin’s life like a grub—preying on his weaknesses and his sexual orientation.”
― Diane L. Kowalyshyn, Crossbones

“In the end, though, it's all about giving back the teeth that the current 'sweetie-vamp' craze has, by and large, stolen from the bloodsuckers. It's about making them scary again.”
― Stephen King, American Vampire, Vol. 1

“A sparking. I know this feeling. Just before a flare-up, there’s a moment. Hard to describe, hard to pin down, but for me it almost makes it worth it. The pain and the loss, all of it a fair price for this. This strength, this power, this eagerness to bare my teeth.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“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