Quotes About Darkness

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.

forests of monsterous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannible devils; mound like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion...insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with fungous vegetation...Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of clearing skies.

Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.

Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don't burn it.

Rara vez deja de haber ironía incluso en el mayor de los horrores.

the daemoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out the mockeries of hell in a cracked, sardonic bass.

For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face.

the rats inevitably dragged away the whole cadaver through the hole they gnawed in the coffin.

In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around.

shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch

I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of thunder was in the clouds

But of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets.

I. Introduction

I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body. The scene I cannot describe--I should faint if I tried it, for there is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black shadows. The

St. John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.

They's allus ben unseen things araound Dunwich—livin' things—as ain't human an' ain't good fer human folks.

Some said the thunder called the lurking fear out of its habitation, while others said the thunder was its voice.

Ye have done much to bring about the indescribable return. May ye go mad quickly and not be devoured.

Again there was silence—a silence as of consummated Evil brooding above its unnamable triumph.

It was dismal sitting there on rickety boxes in the pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our pocket lamps about.

It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.

Now, as the baying of that dead, fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.

I hate the moon—I am afraid of it—for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous. It

God!...If only I had not read so much Egyptology before coming to this land which is the fountain of all darkness and terror!