Quotes About Horror

While horror may make us squirm or quake, it will not make us cry at the pity of things. The vampire may symbolize our horror of both life and death, but none of us has ever been uprooted by a symbol. The zombie may conceptualize our sickness of the flesh and its appetites, but no one has ever been sickened to death by a concept.

the logic of supernatural horror [is] a logic founded on fear, a logic whose sole principle states: "Existence equals nightmare." Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure..

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait until you arrive there yourself. (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902)

Generally speaking: Expect nothing but nightmarish obscenities to be born when human heads come together in intercourse.

Supernatural horror was one of the ways we found that would allow us to live with our double selves. By its employ, we discovered how to take all the things that victimize us in our natural lives and turn them into the very stuff of demonic delight in our fantasy lives. In story and song, we could entertain ourselves with the worst we could think of, overwriting real pains with ones that were unreal and harmless to our species.

Mainländer was confident that the Will-to-die he believed would well up in humanity had been spiritually grafted into us by a God who, in the beginning, masterminded His own quietus. It seems that existence was a horror to God. Unfortunately, God was impervious to the depredations of time. This being so, His only means to get free of Himself was by a divine form of suicide.

After all, is it not wondrous that we are allowed to be both witnesses and victims of the sepulchral pomp of wasting tissue? And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us.

There will come a day for each of us, and then for all of us, when the future will be done with. Until then, humanity will acclimate itself to every new horror that comes knocking as it has done from the very beginning.

For other organisms, bumbling along from here to nowhere is well managed. For us, it is a messy business and often intolerably horrific. To end all this paradox and horror [...] we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.

Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willingly consume the terrors of the tomb...and find them to our liking.

There are things which only madmen fear because only madmen may truly conceive of them.

And I succumbed to an ecstatic horror at this insight.

Abbiamo bisogno di sapere che le marionette sono marionette. Ciononostante, potrebbero ancora farci paura. Perché, se osserviamo la marionetta in un certo modo, è come se ci guardassimo indietro, non come esseri umani ma come marionette. Parrebbe di essere sul punto di prendere vita. In questi momenti di lieve confusione, si manifesta un conflitto psicologico, una percezione dissonante che attraversa il nostro essere con una convulsione di orrore soprannaturale.

Once and for all, lets us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willing consume the terror of the tomb... and find them to our liking.

One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses theme and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

And my mind - another disease, the disease of a disease. Everywhere my mind sees the disease of other minds and other bodies, these other organisms that are only other diseases, an absolute nightmare of the organism.

Something is back there. She feels this to be a horrible truth. She almost knows what the thing is, but, afflicted with some kind of oneiric aphasia, she cannot find the word for what she fears. She can only wait, hoping that sudden shock will soon bring her out of the dream, for she is now aware that "she is dreaming," thinking of herself in the third person.

I realize that what I have written so far about supernatural horror stories sounds as if my goal in writing them is to demoralize and depress my readers. I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. In my literary philosophy, if story fails to entertain readers, to captivate them with characters and incidents they never could have imagined themselves, then that story has failed.

All supernatural horror depends on a confusion of what we believe should be and should not be. As scientists, philosophers, and spiritual figures have attested, our heads are full of illusions; things, including human things, are frequently not what they seem…No one can prove that our existence is a paradox and a horror. Everything is alright with the world.

Sanity, however, was so integral to his character that neither hysteria nor horror could long have their way with him.

He looked outside once more. It was like a Bosch painting, except that Bosch lacked the imagination or nerve for this horror. In some forlorn part of his brain Neil heard Abba singing "Fernando" in a tinny voice.

A sinner crowds God out of his thoughts. He never thinks of God, unless with horror, as the prisoner thinks of the judge.

They took a baseball bat and whacked open his head. Mummy Boy fell to the ground; he finally was dead. Inside of his head were no candy or prizes, just a few stray beetles of various sizes.

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.