"You will arrive along the old road. It winds with a troubling, serpent-like suggestion through the corrupted countryside. Leading only, I fear, to ever more tenebrous places. There is a sickness in the ancient pitted cobbles of the old road and on its writhing path you will face viciousness, violence, and perhaps other damnably transcendent terrors. So steel yourself and remember: there can be no bravery without madness. The old road will take you to hell, but in that gaping abyss we will find our redemption."

"[First line] Ruin has come to our family."

"You answered the letter. Now, like me, you are a part of this place."

"The plume… and the pistol. A fitting end to my folly, and a curse upon us all."

"Monstrous size has no intrinsic merit, unless inordinate exsanguination be considered a virtue."

"The bigger the beast, the greater the glory."

"I was lord of this place… until the crows and rats made it their domain."

"Perhaps… things are not as bad as they seem… [rueful, sinister laugh]"

"Women and men, soldiers and outlaws, fools and corpses; all will find their way to us now that the road is clear."

"A predator is often blind to its own peril."

"The way is lit. The path is clear. We require only the strength to follow it."

"Even the fiercest beast will lie down when it hasn’t eaten."

"[On the swinefolk] They breed quickly down there in the dark… but perhaps we can slay them even faster."

"The fiends must be driven back. And what better place to begin, than the seat of our noble line."

"I beg you, deliver our family from the ravenous, clutching shadow… of the Darkest Dungeon."

"Alone in the woods or tunnels, survival is the same. Prepare. Persist. And overcome."

"Shoot, bandage, and pillage - the dancing steps of war!"

"[On the Leper] This man understands that adversity and existence are one and the same."

"To those with a keen eye, gold gleams like a dagger's point."

"You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial. It is a festering abomination!"

"[Blight/bleed kill] Great is the weapon that cuts on its own!"

"Curious is the trap-maker's art... his efficacy unwitnessed by his own eyes."

"As victories mount, so too will resistance."

"Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer."

"In time, you will know the tragic extent of my failings..."

"Can you feel it? The walls between the sane world and that unplumbed dimension of delirium are tenuously thin here..."

"All the decadent horrors I have seen pale in comparison with that final, crowning thing. I could not look, nor could I look away!"

"A little hope, however desperate, is never without worth."

"Every creature has a weakness. The wise hero trains for what she will face."

"Some may fall, but their knowledge lives on."

"In the end, every plan relies upon a strong arm, and tempered steel."

"A strict regimen is paramount, if one is to master the brutal arithmetic of combat."

"They must learn more than brutal bloodletting — they must learn to survive!"

"Corruption has soaked the soil, sapping all good life from these groves… let us burn out this evil."

"At last, wholesome marine life can flourish - if indeed there is such a thing."

"[On the Siren] Hideous matriarch, vile queen of the aphotic depths - she has no place in the sane world!"

"And the thought recurs to me--if such a monstrous entity as the Master of the Monolith somehow survived its own unspeakably distant epoch so long--what nameless shapes may even now lurk in the dark places of the world?"

"Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse."

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

"It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world — we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death — the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed."

"Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men."

"I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives."

"No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:"

"That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return."

"There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them. These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die..."