Quotes from Clark Ashton Smith

Within, there were several ponderous brazen-bound volumes of medieval date, a thin manuscript of yellowing parchment, and two portraits whose faces had been turned to the wall, as if it were unlawful for even the darkness of the sealed closet to behold them.

Behind each thing a shadow lies; Beauty hath e'er its cost: Within the moonlight-flooded skies How many stars are lost!

Lunatics with a speculative bent can sometimes stumble overly close to certain guarded cosmic secrets.

White spiders, demon-headed and large as monkeys, had woven their webs in the hollow arches of the bones; and they swarmed out interminably as Nushain approached; and the skeleton seemed to stir and quiver as they seethed over it abhorrently and dropped to the ground before the astrologer. Behind them others poured in a countless army, crowding and mantling every ossicle.

It would seem, O Nushain, that you have doubted your own horoscope,' said the guide, with a certain irony. 'However, even a bad astrologer, on occasion, may read the heavens aright. Obey, then, the stars that decreed your journey.

In a less scientific age he would have been a devil-worshiper, a partaker in the abominations of the Black Mass; or he would have given himself to the study and practice of sorcery. His was a religious soul that had failed to find good in the scheme of things; and lacking it, was impelled to make of evil itself an object of secret reverence. - The Devotee of Evil

And it irritated me beyond all measure that a thought so enormous and ludicrous should return when my logic had dismissed it.

The gray mists and the grayer houses were full of the menace of memory: they were like traitorous tombs from which the cadavers of dead hours poured forth to assail me with envenomed fangs and talons.

It is regrettable," resumed Azédarac, "that any question of my holiness and devotional probity should have been raised among the clergy of Averoigne. But I suppose it was inevitable sooner or later— even though the chief difference between myself and many other ecclesiastics is, that I serve the Devil wittingly and of my own free will, while they do the same in sanctimonious blindness.

Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the watchful gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished, and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.

the people were steeped in the crepuscular gloom of antiquity; and were wise with all manner of accumulated lore; and were subtle in the practice of strange refinements, of erudite perversities, of all that can shroud with artful opulence and grace and variety the bare uncouth cadaver of life, or hide from mortal vision the leering skull of death.

A PRECEPT With words of ivory, Of bronze, of ebony, Of alabaster, marble, steel, and gold, The beauty of the visible is told. But how with these express The unseen Loveliness— Splendour and light, and harmony, and sound, The heart hath felt, the sense hath never found? No shining words of stone— Shadow and cloud alone— These shall the poet seek eternally, Whose lines would carve the mask of Mystery.