#horror

We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare. ↗

— Arthur Machen

#horror #moon #reality #space #stars

When you stop chasing your dreams, your dreams start chasing you. ↗

— Dez Del Rio

#horror #magic #occult #paranormal #suspense

It was an unusual sunset. Having sat behind opaque drapery all day, I had not realized that a storm was pushing in and that much of the sky was the precise shade of old suits of armor one finds in museums. At the same time, patches of brilliance engaged in a territorial dispute with the oncoming onyx of the storm. Light and darkness mingled in strange ways both above and below. Shadows and sunshine washed together, streaking the landscape with an unearthly study of glare and gloom. Bright clouds and black folded into each other in a no-man's land of the sky. The autumn trees took on the appearance of sculptures formed in a dream, their leaden-colored trunks and branches and iron-red leaves all locked in an infinite and unliving moment, unnaturally timeless. The gray lake slowly tossed and tumbled in a dead sleep, nudging unconsciously against its breakwall of numb stone. A scene of contradiction and ambivalence, a tragicomedic haze over all. A land of perfect twilight. ↗

— Thomas Ligotti

#dreams

The princess of perverted plants and the demented vampire have come to join us! How absolutely thrilling! ↗

— Nina Bangs

#dreams

The stink of rot and ruin, of old dreams, broken screams, and wicked, dirty little things. ↗

— Damien Walters

#horror-authors #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

Darnell had received what is called a sound commercial education, and would therefore have found very great difficulty in putting into articulate speech any thought that was worth thinking; ↗

— Arthur Machen

#supernatural #education

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#poe #short-stories #the-cask-of-amontillado #equality

There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them. Most people don't know this and this is just as well because the world could not really operate if everyone stayed in bed with the blankets over their head, which is what would happen if people knew what horrors lay a shadow's width away. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#dark #discworld #equal-rites #horror #terry-pratchett

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