Quotes from Robert E. Howard

you civilized men are soft; your lives are not nailed to your spines as are ours

Again the governor knelt, for part of his wisdom was the knowledge that a woman in such an emotional tempest is as perilous as a blind cobra to any about her.

It will bear thrice my own," answered Taurus. "It was woven from the tresses of dead women, which I took from their tombs at midnight, and steeped in the deadly wine of the upas tree, to give it strength. I will go first – then follow me closely.

He had never fled from a single foe, and had the thought occurred to him he would have flushed with shame.

How did you come to your crown, you and that black-faced pig beside you? Your fathers did the fighting and the suffering, and handed their crowns to you on golden platters. What you inherited without lifting a finger — except to poison a few brothers — I fought for. "You

They were neither the first nor the last to gild the name of thief.

He saw no particular humor in it, and was too new to civilization to understand its discourtesies. Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing. He was bewildered and chagrined, and doubtless would have slunk away, abashed, but the Kothian chose

not trouble his head about them; he knew that Zamora's religion, like all things of a civilized, longsettled people, was intricate and complex, and had lost most of the pristine essence in a maze of formulas and rituals.

The black spoke in a sea-coast dialect, and Conan replied; he had learned the jargon while a corsair on the coasts of Kush. "Long

Rinaldo wrote me a deathly song there, and keen was the stylus.

But when the next time approached for the full moon, I began to be aware of a strange, malicious influence. An atmosphere of horror hovered in the air and I was aware of inexplicable, uncanny impulses.

Now, if this be true, there is no limit to the horror to which mankind may be heir. If this be true, men may be hovering forever on the brink of unthought oceans of supernatural terror, parted from the next world by a thin veil which may be rent, as we have just seen it rent. I would like to believe otherwise -- but...

Neophytes of the mighty serpent, how many lurked among his cities?

These fiends can take any form they will. That is, they can, by a magic charm or the like, fling a web of sorcery about their faces, as an actor dons a mask, so that they resemble anyone they wish to.

Mingle my dust with the burning brand, Scatter it free to the sky Fling it wide on the ocean's sand, From peaks where the vultures fly.

The gods of old times mated sometimes with mortal women, our legends tell us.

Gods are no more stable than men.

Mankind isn't the first owner of the earth; there were Beings here before his coming -- and now, survivals of hideously ancient epochs. Maybe spheres of alien dimensions press unseen on this material universe today.

Gods black and white, dark and light! He shook his clenched fists above his head in the black gust of his passion. That I should stand by and see a man of mine butchered on a Roman cross—without justice and with no more trial than that farce! Black gods of R'lyeh, even you would I invoke to the ruin and destruction of those butchers! I swear by the Nameless Ones, men shall die howling for that deed, and Rome shall cry out as a woman in the dark who treads upon an adder!

In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle

In writing these yarns I've always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That's why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.

In his ears rang her passionate cry: "Were I still in death and you fighting for life I would come back from the abyss–

A fantastic idea had birth in his mind and grew, that beneath the sheet, the mere lifeless body had become a strange, monstrous thing, a hideous, conscious being, that watched him with eyes which burned through the fabric of the cloth.

Be ready; now is the beginning of happenings.