The Wendigo Quotes

“And it was in that moment of distress and confusion that the whip of terror laid its most nicely calculated lash about his heart.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the only sounds audible. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast world of branches nothing stirred. Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“The bleak splendors of these remote and lonely forests rather overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern quality of the tangled backwoods which can only be described as merciless and terrible, rose out of these far blue woods swimming upon the horizon, and revealed itself. He understood the silent warning. He realized his own utter helplessness.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“...savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity as it exists.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“But sleep, in the long run, proves greater than all emotions.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“Fear, to put it plainly, hovered close about that little camp, and though all three would have been glad to speak of other matters, the only thing they seemed able to discuss was this—the source of their fear. They tried other subjects in vain; there was nothing to say about them.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“His most vulnerable points, moreover, are said to be the feet and the eyes; the feet, you see, for the lust of wandering, and the eyes for the lust of beauty. The poor beggar goes at such a dreadful speed that he bleeds beneath the eyes, and his feet burn.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“Punk had in him still the instincts of his dying race; his taciturn silence and his endurance survived; also his superstition.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“Between the two lonely figures within, however, there pressed another shadow that was not a shadow from the night. It was the Shadow cast by the strange Fear, never wholly exorcised, that had leaped suddenly upon Défago in the middle of his singing. And Simpson, as he lay there, watching the darkness through the open flap of the tent, ready to plunge into the fragrant abyss of sleep, knew first that unique and profound stillness of a primeval forest when no wind stirs... and when the night has weight and substance that enters into the soul to bind a veil about it... Then sleep took him...”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“All the same I wouldn’t laugh about it, if I was you,” Défago added, looking over Simpson’s shoulder into the shadows. “There’s places in there nobody won’t never see into — nobody knows what lives in there either.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“For nothing could explain away the livid terror that had dropped over his face while he stood there sniffing the air. And nothing — no amount of blazing fire, or chatting on ordinary subjects — could make that camp exactly as it had been before. The shadow of an unknown horror, naked if unguessed, that had flashed for an instant in the face and gestures of the guide, had also communicated itself, vaguely and therefore more potently, to his companion.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“For the Panic of the Wilderness had called to him in that far voice—the Power of untamed Distance—the Enticement of the Desolation that destroys.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“They were talking against time.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“He remembered suddenly how his uncle had told him that men were sometimes stricken with a strange fever of the wilderness, when the seduction of the uninhabited wastes caught them so fiercely that they went forth, half fascinated, half deluded, to their death.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo

“He was deeply susceptible, moreover, to that singular spell which the wilderness lays upon certain lonely natures, and he loved the wild solitudes with a kind of romantic passion that amounted almost to an obsession. The life of the backwoods fascinated him—whence, doubtless, his surpassing efficiency in dealing with their mysteries”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Wendigo