Quotes from William Hope Hodgson

And in my boyhood, I have wandered oft a week of days in that Country of Silence, and had my food with me, and slept quietly amid the memories; and gone on again, wrapped about with the quiet of the Everlasting.

Yet that, after such age, if a youth desired greatly to make the adventure, he should receive three lectures upon the dangers of which we had knowledge, and a strict account of the mutilatings and horrid deeds done to those who had so adventured.

I passed through the short chancel, and reached the step that led up to the small gate in the chancel-rail. I threw the beam from my lantern upon the dagger. Yes, I thought, it's all right. Abruptly, it seemed to me that there was something wanting, and I leaned forward over the chancel-gate to peer, holding the light high. My suspicion was hideously correct. The dagger had gone. Only the cross-shaped sheath hung there above the altar.

And afterwards the People did wander over that Country of Silence, and made visit and honour to their Ancestors, if such were deserving.

He nodded, sagely, at the lot of us, and yawned; then glanced at the clock. "Out you go!" he said, in friendly fashion, using the recognised formula. "I want a sleep." We rose, shook him by the hand, and went out presently into the night and the quiet of the Embankment; and so to our homes.

As if (I remember thinking) some monstrous giant had been holding mad carnival with itself at the end of that great passage.

One thing the landlord was particular to point out, that no tenant had ever complained about knockings, or doors slamming. As for the smell, he seemed positively indignant about it; but why, I don't suppose he quite knew himself, except that he probably had some vague feeling that it was an indirect accusation on my part that the drains were not right.

Still, I have felt it better to have a dog about the place. They are wonderful creatures.

Life], electricity or fire. They are, all three, of the outer forces -- monsters of the void. Nothing we can do will create any one of them, our power is merely to be able, by providing the conditions, to make each one of them manifest to our physical senses. . . .

I read, and, in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible that blind the mind, and looked out into the unknown.

There had stood a great house in the centre of the gardens, where now was left only that fragment of ruin. This house had been empty for a great while; years before his—the ancient man's—birth. It was a place shunned by the people of the village, as it had been shunned by their fathers before them. There were many things said about it, and all were of evil. No one ever went near it, either by day or night. In the village it was a synonym of all that is unholy and dreadful.

And, suddenly, it came home to me that I was a little man in a little ship, in the midst of a very great sea.

I am what I might term an unprejudiced sceptic. I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things 'on principle,' as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact.

And then, suddenly, an extraordinary question rose in my mind, whether this stupendous globe of green fire might not be the vast Central Sun—the great sun, round which our universe and countless others revolve. I felt confused. I thought of the probable end of the dead sun, and another suggestion came, dumbly—Do the dead stars make the Green Sun their grave? The idea appealed to me with no sense of grotesqueness; but rather as something both possible and probable.

The history of all love is writ with one pen.

And oft I harked into the night of the Land; but there was nowhere any sound, or disturbing of the aether, to trouble me.

The immutable, awful quiet of a dying world.

To the North-West I looked, and in the wide field of my glass, saw plain the bright glare of the fire from the Red Pit, shine upwards against the underside of the vast chin of the North-West Watcher—The Watching Thing of the North-West…. That which hath Watched from the Beginning, and until the opening of the Gateway of Eternity came into my thoughts, as I looked through the glass …

And, so to tell more about the South Watcher. A million years gone, as I have told, came it out from the blackness of the South, and grew steadily nearer through twenty thousand years; but so slow that in no one year could a man perceive that it had moved.

I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things 'on principle,' as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact.

To my right, which was to the North, there stood, very far away, the House of Silence, upon a low hill. And in that House were many lights, and no sound. And so had it been through an uncountable Eternity of Years.

And I cannot touch her face  And I cannot touch her hair, And I kneel to empty shadows-- Just memories of her grace; And her voice sings in the winds And in the sobs of dawn And among the flowers at night And from the brooks at sunrise And from the sea at sunset, And I answer with vain callings  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire.

Sometimes, in my dreams, I see that enormous pit, surrounded, as it is, on all sides by wild trees and bushes. And the noise of the water rises upwards, and blends—in my sleep—with other and lower noises; while, over all, hangs the eternal shroud of spray.