Horror Authors

"See, when you get down to the basics of it, everything’s just molecules vibrating. Which is what music is, what sound is—vibrations in the air. So we’re all part of that music and the worthier it is, the more voices we can add to it, the better off we all are."

"I was going through the motions of life, instead of really living, and there’s no excuse for that. It’s not something I’ll let happen to me again."

"Humanity’s whole unfortunate history is one long account of how we attack what we don’t understand, what’s strange to us."

"Jilly always says the family we choose for ourselves is more important than the one we were born into; that people have to earn our respect and trust, not have it handed to them simply because of genetics."

"It’s not that I don’t have convictions, or that I won’t defend them. I save my battles for things that have meaning instead of tilting at every mild irritation that comes my way. You can fritter away your whole life with those kinds of windmills."

"She’s always so ready to believe anything that anyone tells her, so long as it’s magical. Well, I believe in magic, too, but it’s the magic that can turn a caterpillar into a butterfly, the natural wonder and beauty of the world that’s all around me. I can’t believe in some dreamland being real."

"“He can be so sweet on one page, and then on the next he’s taking you on a tour through an abattoir.” “Just like life,” Bramley said."

"In one form or another, it was one of the first implements created by ancient people to give voice to the mysteries that words cannot encompass, but that they had a need to express; only the drum was older."

"I'm not Chinese. I thrive in interesting times."

"I find that a lot of people have this thing about making crap romantic, the way they like to blur outlaws and heroes, the good with the bad."

"If you're not ready to die, then how can you live?"

"I don't know why I care what people write about me after I'm dead, except that since I invest so much of my time telling the truth in my fiction, I'd hate to see someone play fast and loose with the pieces of my life. I don't care what they might think of me; but I don't want lies about my life used to invalidate the stories. My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn't have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own."

"One expected growth, change; without it, the world was less, the well of inspiration dried up, the muses fled."

"I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?"

"He had seen trances before — wise men far in the east, who could feign death; a herbwife as she bent over her patient, searching for invisible hurts. But this was different. He could sense something here, within the circle cast by the light of the fire. A presence. Presences..."

"I've always believed the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story."

"I've always had these bouts of depression; I hide them well but doesn't mean they aren't there. … I didn't have anyone around for whom I had to put on a cheerful mask. The thing with pretending you're in a good mood is that sometimes you can actually trick yourself into feeling better."

"Witchery is merely a word for what we are all capable of — heightened nightsight, an empathy shared with the beasts, a utilization of the more obscure abilities of our minds. Nothing that science can't explain away. Wizardry is spells and enchantments. Fairy tales."

"Legend and myth are what we use to describe what we don't comprehend. They are out attempts to make the impossible, possible — at least insofar as our spirits interact with the spirit of the world, or if that is too animistic for you, then let's use Jung's terminology and call it our racial subconscious. No matter the semantics, they are of a kind and it is legend and myth that binds us all together. … Through them, through their retellings, and through those version that are called religion while they are current, we are taught Truth and we attempt to understand Mystery."

"Like legend and myth, magic fades when it is unused — hence all the old tales of elfin Kingdoms moving further and further away from our world, or that magical beings require our faith, our belief in their existence, to survive. … That is a lie. All they require is our recognition."

"It may sound trite, but using the weapons of the enemy, no matter how good one's intentions, makes one the enemy."

"Why did men worship in churches, locking themselves away in the dark, when the world lay beyond its doors in all its real glory?"

"A body of work may be reviled — mostly by those who have no knowledge of its workings — and yet still carry elements of what can only be considered eternal truths."

"It's not the work or the personality of the founder of a religion that's important, but what its followers do with what they learn..."

"I love this world … That is what rules my life. When I die, I want to have done all in my power to leave it in a better state than it was in when I found it. At the same time I know that this can never be. The world has grown so complex that one voice can do little to alter it any longer. That doesn't stop me from doing what I can but it makes the task hard. The successes are so small, the failures so large and many. It's like trying to stem a storm with one's bare hands."

"They stood and listened, arms around each other for comfort, as the sound washed over them. It reverberated in the marrow of their bones, sung high and sweet, heartbreakingly mournful, quick as a jig, slow as the saddest air. Their hearts swelled with its beauty, its mystery. With all it revealed, and all that it hid."

"The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents."

"I know that feeling all too well, but I broke the only pair of rose-colored glasses I had the chance to own a long time ago."

"The Lost Music was his way of talking about the way he believed that old wives' tales and dance tunes and folktales were just the tangled echoes of something that's not quite of this world … something we all knew once, but have forgotten since."

"While you live … you have a duty to life. … The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them. … Otherwise they fade away."

"It seeks but will not be sought. It finds but will not be found. It holds the one who would touch, Who would cut away pain and ill. But its blade cuts two ways and will not be turned. If you value your well-being, Impede not its way. Treat the toucher doubly well, For he bears the weight Of the balance that must be struck."

"I believe in things I never used to. I think someone is trying to find me — has found me. And is calling. Who it is I don't know. What they want I don't know. But a little while ago I found out one more thing — this sword." I picked the sword up from the table. "It isn't what I want," I went on, "But sometimes, when my mind is — abstract, something from outside floats into it. Like the need for a sword. And not any sword — just one. I don't know what the sword looks like, but I'd know if I held it in my hand." I laughed a little. "And if I drew it a few inches from the sheath, I could put out that fire up there as if I'd blown on it like a candleflame. And if I drew the sword all the way out — the world would come to an end!"

"There is a sword," I said. "A sword that is — is not quite a sword as we think of weapons. My mind is cloudy there still. But I know that Ghast Rhymi can tell me where it is. A weapon, yet not a weapon. The Sword Called Llyr."

"Well, all this belongs to the future. And so do I. Even before the cosmic cleavage altered all history I was a misfit in this civilization. And now it just isn't my world anymore. I don't belong here. So I think I'll take my chances in that other place, where I won't have to get used to the little things that keep bothering me here and bother nobody but me..."

"Her hands came out of her sleeves. There was a rod of blinding silver in each. Before I could stir she had brought the rods together, crossing them before her smiling face. At the intersection forces of tremendous power blazed into an instant's being, forces that streamed from the poles of the world and could touch only for the beat of a second if that world were not to be shaken into fragments. I felt the building reel below me. I felt the gateway open."

"This isn't my world, now. Not any more. Not the world I left. This is a world in which no nekronic flash leaped from a box that Ira De Kalb opened and dropped to his hearthstone to infect the world, De Kalb and me. All that did happen once, in another world that hasn't existed since the four of us, a doubled weapon wielded by the Face of Ea, wrought the cleaving apart of two universes. Imponderable forces shifted when that cleavage took place. You and I know nothing about it, for it happened far beyond the perceptions of any sentient creature. But it happened. Oh yes, it happened."

"I'm going forward. I know — because I went. It was a wonderful world they had. I want to see more of it. I want to wake up in a time when the race of man is spreading through the galaxy, leaping across the gulfs between the stars, opening the gates to all the worlds. I want to and I will."

"The race moves on. It has its human limitations. The tools we make have no limitations at all. When we educate ourselves to learn to handle those tools most efficiently we can go on to the next step, whatever it may be. Meanwhile there must be check and balance—rigid control."

"For me, the Big Ride. You start when you’re born. You climb on the toboggan and then you’re off. But you can only have the one ride. No use telling the ticket-taker you want to go again. They shovel you under at the end of the slope and there’s a new lot of passengers waiting. You’ve had your three-score and ten. And it’s over."

"He seemed to feel something like indulgent contempt for the rest of the world. It was all right, I suppose. Nobody had better reason. The man was a genius."

"I never understood the ultimate answer. That was beyond me. It took the combined skills of three great civilizations far apart in time to frame that godlike concept in which the tangible universe itself was only a single factor. And even then it was not enough. It took the Face of Ea — which I shall never be able to describe fully. I saw it, though. I saw it..."

"“Forbid them to sing it.” But the minister’s voice was dubious. “Ja, but can they be forbidden to think it? They always think of what is verboten. They can’t help it. It’s a basic human instinct.”"

"I closed my eyes again, thinking of the Face. I had to force my mind to turn around in its tracks and look, for it didn't want to confront that infinite complexity again. The Face was painful to see. It was too intricate, too involved with emotions complex beyond our grasp. It was painful for the mind to think of it, straining to understand the inscrutable things that experience had etched upon those mountain-high features. "Is it a portrait?" I asked suddenly. "Or a composite? What is the Face?" "A city," De Kalb said. "A nation. The ultimate in human destiny — and a call for help. And much more that we'll never understand.""

"The whole thing never happened and I can prove it — now. But Ira De Kalb made me wait a billion years to write the story. So we start with a paradox. But the strangest thing of all is that there are no real paradoxes involved, not one. This is a record of logic. Not human logic, of course, not the logic of this time or this space."

"I don't know if men will ever journey again, as we journeyed, to that intersection of latitude and longitude where a shell hangs forever — forever and yet not forever, in space and out of space — on the axis stretching through time from beginning to end. From the dawn of the nebulae to the twilight of absolute entropy, when the framework of the cosmos has broken down into chaos, still that axis will stretch from dawn to dusk, from beginning to end. For as this world spins on an axis through space, so the sphere of time spins on its own axis."

"The social problems were far tougher than technological ones, because the human basics remained unaltered, and people don’t change as fast as things."

"People don’t change, they just grow older. But fads and gadgets and trivia alter fast, even to the point of becoming unrecognizable."

"The man had a bad temper, and if people kicked him around, he asked for it by starting the kicking himself."

"Harding was elected because he promised normalcy. After war, men were tired. They wanted to crawl back into a 1912 womb. They didn’t want experiments that might upset their lives further."

"She was suffering the first pains of maturity’s burden, the knowledge of responsibility misused."