Quotes from Algernon Blackwood

Era este hombre muy estirado y relamido, y la gente estirada y relamida suele vivir habitualmente en un mundo tan reducido que cualquier cosa violenta e inusitada les puede sacar brusca y completamente de él; por ello, esta clase de gente suele desconfiar instintivamente de todo lo que represente una cierta originalidad.

Life, using matter to express itself in bodily shape, first traces a geometrical pattern. From the lowest form in crystals, upwards to more complicated patterns in the higher organisations—there is always first this geometrical pattern as skeleton.

you look like the spirit of the island, with moss in your hair and wind in your eyes, and sun and stars mixed in your face.

He understood now why the world was strange, why horses galloped furiously, and why trains whistled as they raced through stations.

He loved the gigantic peace the Desert gave him. The world was forgotten there; and not the world merely, but all memory of it. Everything faded out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.

Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil.

I wish I were not quite so lonely—and so poor. And yet I love both my loneliness and my poverty. The former makes me appreciate the companionship of the wind and rain, while the latter preserves my liver and prevents me wasting time in dancing attendance upon women.

Of course, he smothered it in words—odd words, too—melodramatic, poetic, out-of-the-way words that lie just on the edge of frenzy.

Of course it was nonsense, but then it haunted him, and once an idea begins to do that it ceases to be nonsense. It has clothed itself in reality.

Other life pulsed about them — and was gone.

For nothing could explain away the livid terror that had dropped over his face while he stood there sniffing the air. And nothing — no amount of blazing fire, or chatting on ordinary subjects — could make that camp exactly as it had been before. The shadow of an unknown horror, naked if unguessed, that had flashed for an instant in the face and gestures of the guide, had also communicated itself, vaguely and therefore more potently, to his companion.

All the same I wouldn't laugh about it, if I was you," Défago added, looking over Simpson's shoulder into the shadows. "There's places in there nobody won't never see into — nobody knows what lives in there either.

The whole experience whose verge we touched was unknown to humanity at all. It was a new order of experience, and in the true sense of the word unearthly.

She drew him softly downwards to his knees. He sank; he yielded utterly; he obeyed. Her weight was upon him, smothering, delicious. The snow was to his waist.... She kissed him softly on the lips, the eyes, all over his face. And then she spoke his name in that voice of love and wonder, the voice that held the accent of two others—both taken over long ago by Death—the voice of his mother, and of the woman he had loved.

We must keep our minds quiet-it's our minds they feel.

I forgot the shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded more than I can possibly explain.

Do not menion them more than you help. Do not refer to them by name. To name is to reveal; it is the inevitable clue, and our only hope lies in ignoring them, in order that they may ignore us.

He disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody.

It's the willows themselves humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces that are against us.

They have put it into my mind; try your hardest to prevent their putting it into yours.

I was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear that plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way and that, and replaced them quivering.

It is the same with all the emotions," he said. "The experiences of others never give a complete account. Until a man has deliberately turned and faced for himself the fiends that chase him down the years, he has no knowledge of what they really are, or of what they can do.

Es imposible que tales potencias o seres hayan sobrevivido... hayan sobrevivido a una época infinitamente remota donde... la conciencia se manifestaba, quizá, bajo cuerpos y formas que ya hace tiempo se retiraron ante la marea de la ascendiente humanidad... formas de las que sólo la poesía y la leyenda han conservado un fugaz recuerdo con el nombre de dioses, monstruos, seres míticos de toda clase y especie...

Smoke and fire go together always.