Quotes from Algernon Blackwood

Air represented a confident and free imagination in which everything was possible. Earth he still loved, but only as a place to land on and take off from.

for there is nothing more desolate in all the abodes of men than an unfurnished house dimly lit, silent, and forsaken, and yet tenanted by rumour with the memories of evil and violent histories.

He drew into his shell a little, giving the merest sketch of what had happened. But he listened closely while these two practical old friends supplied hm with infomration in the gossiping way that human nature loves.

He was deeply susceptible, moreover, to that singular spell which the wilderness lays upon certain lonely natures, and he loved the wild solitudes with a kind of romantic passion that amounted almost to an obsession. The life of the backwoods fascinated him—whence, doubtless, his surpassing efficiency in dealing with their mysteries

No doubt there was much embroidery, and more perversion, exaggeration too, but the account evidently rested upon some basis of solid foundation for all that. Smoke and fire go together always.

The world was forgotten there; and not the world merely, but the memory of it. Everything faded out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.

What impressed him, however, more than everything else was the enormous vitality that rose out of all this apparent death.

Here was the stillness of eternity.

Behind the spread grey masque of apparent death lay stores of accumulated life, ready to break forth at any point

He was never alone. A companionship of millions went with him, and he felt the Desert close, as stars are close to one another, or grains of sand.

To call away someone," he went on in the same thrilling voice, "someone who is not quite ready to come, but who is needed elsewhere for a worthier purpose.

Every corner of the globe, with its different activities, touched their hearts and minds with interest—busy, rushing life in various forms, and all going on simultaneously, at this moment—now. Life obviously was one. The strange unity was convincing. Nothing they saw was alien to themselves, for they took part in it.

Te necesito. A tí, querida alma de mi pasado sombrío -se apretó junto a él tanto que su aliento le rozaba los ojos, y su voz cantó literalmente al decir -: Te tengo, porque tu me amas y estás por completo a mi merced.

Estaba en la plenitud de la exaltación. El mundo yacía bajo sus pies, hecho de música y flores; y el volaba muy por encima, a través de un crepúsculo de pura delicia.

Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.

Y era como la vaga y desagradable idea de que sin darnos cuenta, habíamos estado bromeando con estas grandes fuerzas elementales en cuyo poder estábamos indefensos, cada hora del día y de la noche. Pues aquí, sin duda, estaban en juego poderes gigantescos, cuyo solo aspecto visual estimulaba ya la imaginación.

Su mismo carácter de cosas ordinarias, sentía yo, enmascaraba aquello que era maligno y hostil a nosotros.

The Wise are silent, the Foolish speak, and children are thus led astray.

No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the walls of memory.

When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.

Not easily may an individual escape the deep slavery of the herd.

Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to exalt.

The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings.

It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally witnessed. ("The Wendigo")