Horror Quotes

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”
― Stephen King

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”
― Stephen King

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”
― Stephen King

“Read. Read. Read. Just don't read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.”
― R.L. Stine

“There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“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

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don't have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn't mean they apply to you.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

“Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.”
― Stephen King

“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

“Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.”
― Stephen King, It

“A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.

I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.

In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.

I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.

But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning.

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. 'If I have seen further than other men,' said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
― Isaac Asimov, Adding a Dimension: Seventeen Essays on the History of Science

“Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“Quiet people have the loudest minds.”
― Stephen King

“[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.”
― Clive Barker

“   In 1658, Francis Andrew Ransome stole the Alchemy Scroll from St. Julian’s college, my present employer. Ransome was a member of a transatlantic group called The Invisible College. They were alchemists, meaning they worked with matter and spirit together.”
― Susan Rowland, The Alchemy Fire Murder: a Mary Wandwalker Mystery

“I do not love men: I love what devours them.”
― André Gide, Prometheus Illbound

“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

“Though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley”
― Alex Garland

“But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.”
― Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

“The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;
We find delight in the most loathsome things;
Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,
And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Blood is really warm,
it's like drinking hot chocolate
but with more screaming.”
― Ryan Mecum, Zombie Haiku: Good Poetry for Your...Brains

“I think that God that we have created and allowed to shape our culture through, essentially Christian theology is a pretty villainous creature. I think that one of the things that male patriarchal figure has done is, allowed under it's, his church, his wing, all kinds of corruptions and villainies to grow and fester. In the name of that God terrible wars have been waged, in the name of that God terrible sexism has been allowed to spread. There are children being born all across this world that don't have enough food to eat because that God, at least his church, tells the mothers and fathers that they must procreate at all costs, and to prevent procreation with a condom is in contravention with his laws. Now, I don't believe that God exists. I think that God is creation of men, by men, and for men. What has happened over the many centuries now, the better part of two thousand in fact, is that that God has been slowly and steadily accruing power. His church has been accruing power, and the men who run that church, and they are all men, are not about to give it up. If they give it up, they give up luxury, they give up comfort.”
― Clive Barker

“I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.”
― Chuck Palahniuk