#horror

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. ↗

— Shirley Jackson

#house #dreams

Within its gates I heard the sound Of winds in cypress caverns caught Of huddling tress that moaned, and sought To whisper what their roots had found. (“A Dream of Fear”) ↗

— George Sterling

#graveyard #horror #scary #supernatural #trees

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red. ↗

— Clive Barker

#equality #horror #reading #equality

Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#death

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling .... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and [yet] with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience. ↗

— Edmund Burke

#sublime #terror #beauty

Lifes a bitch and then you keep on fucking living." Gonko The Clown The Pilo Family Circus ↗

— Will Elliott

#family

Honey, you worry too much. Nothing is going to happen, I mean come on, you’re in the house of Mr. Hausefalle, the guru of home security! You’re probably safer over there than here."- House Trap, ch. 4: A Grave Mistake. ↗

— Mike Mauthor

#realistic-fiction #suspense #thriller #home

I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit. ↗

— H.P. Lovecraft

#horror #humor #humor

For an instant Harry imagined... Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shut down and told him never to imagine that again. ↗

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

#imagination #imagination

Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell! ↗

— Thomas Bailey Aldrich

#imagination