The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories Quotes

“The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories

“Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their immediate neighbourhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories

“Ordinary sounds remain ordinary only so long as one is not listening to them; under the influence of intense listening they become unusual, portentous, and therefore extraordinary.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories

“It was three o'clock; the hour when life's pulses beat lowest; when poor souls lying between life and death find it hardest to resist.”
― Algernon Blackwood, THE EMPTY HOUSE AND OTHER GHOST STORIES

“Of course, he smothered it in words—odd words, too—melodramatic, poetic, out-of-the-way words that lie just on the edge of frenzy.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories

“For one single second I understood clearly that the past and the future exist actually side by side in one immense Present; that it was I who moved to and fro among shifting, protean appearances.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories

“It is the same with all the emotions," he said. "The experiences of others never give a complete account. Until a man has deliberately turned and faced for himself the fiends that chase him down the years, he has no knowledge of what they really are, or of what they can do.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories

“Giles de Rays, maréchal of France, who was said to have killed and tortured to death in a few years no less than one hundred and sixty women and children for the purposes of necromancy,”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories

“He was trying to make up for lost time and money in a way that showed conclusively he did not understand the value of either.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories

“Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories

“we were two men waiting in an alleged haunted barn for something to happen;”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House: And Other Ghost Stories

“fear . . . I think that death from fear, or madness from fear, must sum up in a second of time the total of all the most awful sensations it is possible for a man to know.”
― Algernon Blackwood, THE EMPTY HOUSE AND OTHER GHOST STORIES

“catching his breath. He felt as if his spine had suddenly become hollow and someone had filled it with particles of ice.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories (Annotated)

“servant if you watch him all the time. You must always stand over a Jew, though, if you want things done properly. They're tricky and uncertain unless they're working for their own interest.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories

“There was an air of obsequious insolence about the old Jew that was very offensive.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories

“like a priest's cassock reaching to the feet. It was altogether a lugubrious figure of a man, sinister and funereal, yet it seemed in perfect harmony with the general character of its surroundings.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories

“for there is nothing more desolate in all the abodes of men than an unfurnished house dimly lit, silent, and forsaken, and yet tenanted by rumour with the memories of evil and violent histories.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories

“he kept himself and his forces well in hand the whole evening, compelling an accumulative reserve of control by that nameless inward process of gradually putting all the emotions away and turning the key upon them—a process difficult to describe, but wonderfully effective, as all men who have lived through severe trials of the inner man well understand.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Empty House, and Other Ghost Stories