Four Weird Tales Quotes

“Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“We have tried all things, and found all wanting”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“So convinced was he that the external world was the result of a vast deception practised upon him by the gross senses, that when he stared at a great building like St. Paul's he felt it would not very much surprise him to see it suddenly quiver like a shape of jelly and then melt utterly away, while in its place stood all at once revealed the mass of colour, or the great intricate vibrations, or the splendid sound—the spiritual idea—which it represented in stone.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“Life, using matter to express itself in bodily shape, first traces a geometrical pattern. From the lowest form in crystals, upwards to more complicated patterns in the higher organisations—there is always first this geometrical pattern as skeleton.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“Smoke and fire go together always.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“Love is known only by feeling it," she said, her voice deepening a little. "Behind the form you feel the person loved. The process is an evocation, pure and simple. An arduous ceremonial, involving worship and devotional preparation, is the means. It is a difficult ritual—the only one acknowledged by the world as still effectual. Ritual is the passage way of the soul into the Infinite.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“For according to his beliefs there was no Chance, and could be no ultimate shirking, and to avoid a problem was merely to waste time and lose opportunities for development.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“All his life he had realised that his senses brought to him merely a more or less interesting set of sham appearances; that space, as men measure it, was utterly misleading; that time, as the clock ticked it in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, in fact, that all his sensory perceptions were but a clumsy representation of real things behind the curtain—things he was for ever trying to get at, and that sometimes he actually did get at.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome, that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the shifting frontier.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“The studies that had fascinated his mind in earlier youth returned with the power that had subdued his mind in boyhood.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“The reflection that this sudden intimacy was unnatural, he rejected, for many conversations, for many conversations were really gathered into one.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“What we know instinctively,” she continued, “is simply what we are trying to remember. Knowledge is memory.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“It is never difficult to credit strangers with the qualities and knowledge that oneself craves for, and no doubt Henriot’s active fancy went busily to work.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“Vance merely echoed the rush of her vital personality.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“No doubt there was much embroidery, and more perversion, exaggeration too, but the account evidently rested upon some basis of solid foundation for all that. Smoke and fire go together always.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“He drew into his shell a little, giving the merest sketch of what had happened. But he listened closely while these two practical old friends supplied hm with infomration in the gossiping way that human nature loves.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“This ancient script was graven in his soul.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“He was never alone. A companionship of millions went with him, and he felt the Desert close, as stars are close to one another, or grains of sand.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“Behind the spread grey masque of apparent death lay stores of accumulated life, ready to break forth at any point”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“Here was the stillness of eternity.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“What impressed him, however, more than everything else was the enormous vitality that rose out of all this apparent death.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“The world was forgotten there; and not the world merely, but the memory of it. Everything faded out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales

“he found all religions uninteresting because, almost without exception, they start from the present and speculate ahead as to what men shall become, instead of looking back and speculating why men have got here as they are.”
― Algernon Blackwood, Four Weird Tales