Horror Authors

"He went in search of that honored kinsman with God knows how heavy a weight of anguish at his heart, for he knew he was about to shatter the day-dream of his uncle's life; and he knew that our dreams are none the less terrible to lose, because they have never been the realities for which we have mistaken them."

"Who has not been, or is not to be mad in some lonely hour of life? Who is quite safe from the trembling of the balance?"

"Ruins and copious refreshment ware associated in Mr. Gilbert’s mind; and, indeed, there does seem to be a natural union between ivied walls and lobster-salad, crumbling turrets and cold chicken; just as the domes of Greenwich Hospital, the hilly park beyond, and the rippling water in the foreground, must be for ever and ever associated with floundered souchy and devilled whitebait."

"And now the senna and camomile were to flavour all her life. She was no longer to enjoy that mystical double existence, those delicious glimpses of dreamland, which made up for all the dulness of the common world that surrounded her."

"The wind came whistling up across the frosty open country, and through the leafless woods, and rattled fiercely at the window-frames."

"I am no believer in visions or omens. After all, I would sooner fancy that I was dreaming – dreaming with my eyes open as I stood at the window – than that I beheld the shadows of the dead."

"That he will haunt the footsteps of his enemy after death is the one revenge which a dying man can promise himself; and if men had power thus to avenge themselves the earth would be peopled with phantoms."

"I have waited for your return these many years. You might have found me more tenderly disposed towards you, had you come earlier; but there are some feelings which seem to wear out as a man grows older,—affections that grow paler day by day, like colours fading in the sun."

"And then came a long interregnum devoted to the arts and mysteries of the toilet."

"It is taken as a strong proof of a man's innocence that he should look you full in the face with a steadfast gaze when you look at him with suspicion plainly visible in your eyes; but would he not be the poorest villain if he shirked that encounter of glances when he knows full surely that he is in that moment put to the test? It is rather innocence whose eyelids drop when you peer too closely into its eyes, for innocence is appalled by the stern, accusing glances which it is unprepared to meet. Guilt stares you boldly in the face, for guilt is hardened and defiant, and has this one grand superiority over innocence—that it is prepared for the worst."

"You appreciate his goodness, perhaps; but you don't appreciate him. You just tolerate him because he is good and kind to you, and works like a galley-slave to insure your welfare in the future; but if he could read 'Victor Hugo' like a play-actor and make an idiot of himself about Mendelssohn, you’d adore him."

"He was a student — such things as happened to him, happen sometimes to students. He was a German — such things as happened to him, happen sometimes to Germans. He was young, handsome, studious, enthusiastic, metaphysical, reckless, unbelieving, heartless. And being young, handsome, and eloquent he was beloved."

"Seated in the embrasure of this window, my lady was separated from Robert Audley by the whole length of the room, and the young man could only catch an occasional glimpse of her fair face, surrounded by its bright aureole of hazy, golden hair."

"You seem to have quite a taste for discussing these horrible subjects," she said, rather scornfully; "you ought to have been a detective police officer."

"Do you know, Bob," he said, "that when some of our fellows were wounded in India, they came home, bringing bullets inside them. They did not talk of them, and they were stout and hearty, and looked as well, perhaps, as you or I; but every change in the weather, however slight, every variation of the atmosphere, however trifling, brought back the old agony of their wounds as sharp as ever they had felt it on the battle-field. I've had my wound, Bob; I carry the bullet still, and I shall carry it into my coffin."

"Miss Lucy Graham was blessed with that magic power of fascination, by which a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a smile."

"She had been told too often of her beauty not to know that she was handsomer than the majority of women. She knew that in mental power she was her lover's equal: by birth, by fortune, by every attribute and quality, she was fitted to be his wife, to rule over his household, and to be a purifying and elevating influence in his life. His mother had loved her as warmly as it was possible for that languid nature to love anything. Their two lives were interwoven by the tenderest associations of the past as well as the solemn engagement that bound them in the present. No, it was not possible for Madoline, seeing all things from the standpoint of her own calm and evenly-balanced mind, to imagine infidelity in a lover so long and so closely bound to her. Those sudden aberrations of the human mind which wreck so many lives, and make men and women a world's wonder, had never come within the range of her experience."

"Let any man make a calculation of his existence, subtracting the hours in which he has been thoroughly happy—really and entirely at his ease, without one arriere pensée to mar his enjoyment—without the most infinitesimal cloud to overshadow the brightness of his horizon. Let him do this, and surely he will laugh in utter bitterness of soul when he sets down the sum of his felicity, and discovers the pitiful smallness of the amount. He will have enjoyed himself for a week or ten days in thirty years, perhaps. In thirty years of dull December, and blustering March, and showery April, and dark November weather, there may have been seven or eight glorious August days, through which the sun has blazed in cloudless radiance, and the summer breezes have breathed perpetual balm. How fondly we recollect these solitary days of pleasure, and hope for their recurrence, and try to plan the circumstances that made them bright; and arrange, and predestinate, and diplomatize with fate for a renewal of the remembered joy. As if any joy could ever be built up out of such and such constituent parts! As if happiness were not essentially accidental—a bright and wandering bird, utterly irregular in its migrations; with us one summer's day, and forever gone from us on the next!"

"He was a square, pale-faced man of almost forty, and had the appearance of having outlived every emotion to which humanity is subject."

"I scarcely think there is a greater sin, Lucy," he said, solemnly, "than that of a woman who marries a man she does not love. You are so precious to me, my beloved, that deeply as my heart is set on this, and bitter as the mere thought of disappointment is to me, I would not have you commit such a sin for any happiness of mine. If my happiness could be achieved by such an act, which it could not—which it never could," he repeated, earnestly—"nothing but misery can result from a marriage dictated by any motive but truth and love."

""You have a corpse there, my friends?" "Yes; a corpse washed ashore an hour ago." "Drowned?" "Yes, drowned; — a young girl, very handsome." "Suicides are always handsome," he says; and then he stands for a little while idly smoking and meditating, looking at the sharp outline of the corpse and the stiff folds of the rough canvas covering. Life is such a golden holiday to him young, ambitious, clever — that it seems as though sorrow and death could have no part in his destiny."

"Foul deeds have been done under the most hospitable roofs; terrible crimes have been committed amid the fairest scenes, and have left no trace upon the spot where they were done. I do not believe in mandrake, or in bloodstains that no time can efface. I believe rather that we may walk unconsciously in an atmosphere of crime, and breathe none the less freely. I believe that we may look into the smiling face of a murderer, and admire its tranquil beauty."

"It seemed as though the wise architect who had superintended the building of the Castle Inn had taken especial care that nothing but the frailest and most flimsy material should be used, and that the wind, having a special fancy for this unprotected spot, should have full play for the indulgence of its caprices. To this end pitiful woodwork had been used instead of solid masonry; rickety ceilings had been propped up by fragile rafters, and beams that threatened on every stormy night to fall upon the heads of those beneath them; doors whose specialty was never to be shut, yet always to be banging; windows constructed with a peculiar view to letting in the draft when they were shut, and keeping out the air when they were open. The hand of genius had devised this lonely country inn; and there was not an inch of woodwork, or trowelful of plaster employed in all the rickety construction that did not offer its own peculiar weak point to every assault of its indefatigable foe."

""You are plain, Coraline," I said to myself; "unmistakably plain. You have tolerable eyes, and good teeth; but your nose is a failure, your complexion is pallid, and your mouth is just twice too large for prettiness. Never forget that you are plain, my dear Coralie, and then perhaps other people won't remember quite so often. Shake hands with Fate, accept your thick nose and your pallid complexion as the stern necessities of your existence, and make the most of your eyes and teeth, and your average head of hair." That is the gist of what I said to myself, in less sophisticated language, perhaps, before I was fifteen, and from that line of conduct I have never departed. So, if I have come to nineteen years of age without being admired, I have at least escaped being laughed at!"

"Justice to the dead first," he said; "mercy to the living afterward."

"He had an honest abhorrence of work and regimen of all kinds. He sometimes thought that he ought to have been created a butterfly without having been obliged to endure the laborious preliminary stages of caterpillar and chrysalis."

"I was three-and-thirty years of age. Youth was quite gone; beauty I had never possessed; and I was content to think of myself as a confirmed old maid, a quiet spectator of life's great drama, disturbed by no feverish desire for an active part in the play."

"The widower only sighed and puffed his cigar fiercely out of the open window. Perhaps he was thinking of that far-away time—little better than five years ago, in fact; but such an age gone by to him—when he first met the woman for whom he had worn crape round his hat three days before."

"Self-assertion may deceive the ignorant for a time; but when the noise dies away, we cut open the drum, and find it was emptiness that made the music."

"Reader, when any creature inspires you with this instinctive, unreasoning abhorrence, avoid that creature. He is dangerous. Take warning, as you take warning by the clouds in the sky and the ominous stillness of the atmosphere when there is a storm coming. Nature can not lie; and it is nature which has planted that shuddering terror in your breast; an instinct of self-preservation rather than of cowardly fear, which at the first sight of some fellow-creature tells you more plainly than words can speak, "That man is my enemy!""

"There was a gay wedding a year ago at Compton church, and very grand and very handsome everything was; and sure the bride looked very lovely; but one thing was wrong, and that was the bridegroom."

"The past is all forgiven long ago, dear Ringwood," said his sister earnestly; "it would be ill for brother and sister if the love between them could not outlive old injuries, and be the brighter and the truer for old sorrows."

"The disease which was undermining Lady Cecil’s moral constitution was not sorrow; it was only the absence of joy."

"There were many beautiful vipers in those days and she was one of them."

""The Lord gave, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord." We repeated the holy sentences of resignation; but it was not resignation, it was despair that subdued the violence of our grief."

"Sometimes, people think you read their minds, but it’s just that they’re so predictable."

"It wasn’t what I’d seen and heard and tasted that night that made me mad. It was the fact that I’d seen something unspeakably evil, and yet I wasn’t as totally horrified as I should have been."

"I didn’t really think she was making that much sense. Or if she was, it was all ringing too true for me to want to hear it."

"...in isolation, human minds tend to get strange, like a self-portrait painted from memory, in the dark, using a live snake as a brush."

"Remember that there are elements of your personality you are totally unaware of that are immediately apparent to any stranger within five minutes of meeting you"

"There's an old saying that a child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I'd update it to say the child not sufficiently entertained by the village will burn it down for the spectacle."

"Your heroes aren't gods, they're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else."

"But if I feared it, I faced up to it anyway. A man’s got to be a man sometime. You show me one who was nair afraid, and I’ll right away show you one that nair in his life came up against aught to fear."

"I don’t rightly know today whether I was scared at that time. A thing can come along and happen to you, and you don’t have the time to make up your mind if you’re scared, because there’s so almighty much else you’ve got to tend to somehow."

"“But I ain’t made up my mind on hell, not yet. Maybe it’s truly a-burning away, down below our feet, right this minute.” “Or either, the fire down in there is what made folks decide what hell was.”"

"By now the rain rushed down instead of fell down. It was like what my old folks used to call raining tomcats and hoe handles."

"“If you drop a hook in, you’ll get a bite right quick,” I said. “Maybe not the biggest fish, but the best fighter. They’d fight one another to take the hook.” “There’s some sort of parable to that thought,” she said, not air way cheerfully. “How life gives you something you think is good and wholesome, and then uses it to yank you out of your world.”"

"Anyway, you think for yourself. And if a man can’t do that, he isn’t really thinking."

"Got some dirty tricks? If that’s how it is, you done drove your ducks to the wrong puddle."

"Mind your feet, don’t stumble, and don’t be afraid. Because there never was a better time not to be afraid."