Emma Audsley > Emma's Quotes

“Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”
― Stephen King

“[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.”
― Clive Barker

“They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.”
― Susan Hill

“Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.”
― Guy de Maupassant, The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One

“GONE TO STATIC

it sounds better than it is,
this business of surviving,
making it through
the wrong place
at the wrong time
and living

to tell.
when the talk shows and movie credits
wear off, it's just me and my dumb
luck. this morning
I had that dream again:
the one where I'm dead.

I wake up and nothing's
much different. everything's gone
sepia, a dirty bourbon glass
by the bed, you're
still dead.
I could stumble

to the shower,
scrub the luck of breath off my skin
but it's futile.
the killer always wins.
it's just a matter
of time.

and I have
time. I have grief and liquor to
fill it. tonight, the liquor and I are
talking to you. the liquor says, 'remember'
and I fill in the rest, your hands, your smile.
all those times. remember.

tonight the liquor and I
are telling you about our day.
we made it out of bed. we miss you.
we were surprised by the blood between
our legs. we miss you. we made it to the video
store, missing you. we stopped
at the liquor store

hoping the bourbon would stop
the missing. there's always more
bourbon, more missing
tonight, when we got home,
there was a stray cat
at the door.

she came in.
she screams to be touched.
she screams
when I touch her.
she's right
at home.

not me.
the whisky is open
the vcr is on.
I'm running
the film backwards
and one by one

you come back to me,
all of you.
your pulses stutter to a begin
your eyes go from fixed to blink
the knives come out of your chests, the chainsaws

roar out
from your legs
your wounds seal over
your t-cells multiply, your tumors shrink
the maniac killer
disappears

it's just you and me
and the bourbon and the movie
flickering together
and the air breathes us and I
am home, I am
lucky

I am right
before everything
goes black”
― Daphne Gottlieb, Final Girl

“Though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley”
― Alex Garland

“I think that God that we have created and allowed to shape our culture through, essentially Christian theology is a pretty villainous creature. I think that one of the things that male patriarchal figure has done is, allowed under it's, his church, his wing, all kinds of corruptions and villainies to grow and fester. In the name of that God terrible wars have been waged, in the name of that God terrible sexism has been allowed to spread. There are children being born all across this world that don't have enough food to eat because that God, at least his church, tells the mothers and fathers that they must procreate at all costs, and to prevent procreation with a condom is in contravention with his laws. Now, I don't believe that God exists. I think that God is creation of men, by men, and for men. What has happened over the many centuries now, the better part of two thousand in fact, is that that God has been slowly and steadily accruing power. His church has been accruing power, and the men who run that church, and they are all men, are not about to give it up. If they give it up, they give up luxury, they give up comfort.”
― Clive Barker

“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, The Haunting of Hill House

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
― Neil Gaiman

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
― Albert Camus

“you can’t empathize, if you can’t or aren’t willing to put yourself into someone else’s place with all the compassion and insight you can muster—to find their character through your own character—you have no business calling yourself a fiction writer.”
― Joe Mynhardt, Horror 101: The Way Forward: Career advice by seasoned professionals

“horror MUST stimulate the reader’s mental pressure points more effectively and more consistently than other genres.”
― Joe Mynhardt, Horror 101: The Way Forward: Career advice by seasoned professionals

“Write horror. Don’t let ANYONE ELSE tell you how to conduct your muse. They’re all sour-grapes, wannabe, no-talent bums who WISH they had your skill and motivation. So go forth, my son, and write HORROR.”
― Joe Mynhardt, Horror 101: The Way Forward: Career advice by seasoned professionals

“Reality is strange, exhilarating, and tragic. Sometimes reality is well beyond our understanding.”
― Joe Mynhardt, Horror 101: The Way Forward: Career advice by seasoned professionals

“Fiction should always challenge what you believe in, and make you think hard about what it is to be a human being.”
― Joe Mynhardt, Horror 101: The Way Forward: Career advice by seasoned professionals

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
― Sarah Williams

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
― Angela Carter

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”
― Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

“From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”
― Stephen King

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”
― Stephen King

“It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.”
― Edgar Allen Poe

“Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.”
― Stephen King

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
― Sigmund Freud