Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural Quotes

“Poor sleepers should endeavor to compose themselves. Tampering with empty space, stirring up echoes in pitch-black pits of darkness is scarcely sedative.

("Out Of The Deep")”
― Walter de la Mare, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

“On the hearth, in front of a back-brand to give substance, blazed a fire of thorns, that crackled 'like the laughter of the fool.'

Nineteen persons were gathered here. Of these, five women, wearing gowns of various bright hues, sat in chairs along the wall; girls shy and not shy filled the window-bench; four men, including Charley Jake the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New the parish-clerk, and John Pitcher, a neighboring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law, lolled in the settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over tentative pourparlers on a life companionship, sat beneath the corner-cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot where she was. Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more prevailed in being unhampered by conventional restrictions. Absolute confidence in each other's good opinion begat perfect ease, while the finishing stroke of manner, amounting to a truly princely serenity, was lent to the majority by the absence of any expression or trait denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever - which nowadays so generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes of the social scale.

("The Three Strangers")”
― Thomas Hardy, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

“There was still an hour or two of daylight - even though clouds admitted only a greyish light upon the world, and his Uncle Timothy's house was by nature friendly to gloom.

("Out Of The Deep")”
― Walter de la Mare, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

“When there hasn't been anything there, nothing can be said to have vanished from the place where it has not been.

("Out Of The Deep")”
― Walter de la Mare, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

“Pausing on the threshold, he looked in, conscious not so much of the few familiar sticks of furniture - the trucklebed, the worn strip of Brussels carpet, the chipped blue-banded ewer and basin, the framed illuminated texts on the walls - as of a perfect hive of abhorrent memories.

That high cupboard in the corner, from which certain bodiless shapes had been wont to issue and stoop at him cowering out of his dreams; the crab-patterned paper that came alive as you stared; the window cold with menacing stars; the mouseholes, the rusty grate - trumpet of every wind that blows - these objects at once lustily shouted at him in their own original tongues.

("Out Of The Deep")”
― Walter de la Mare, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

“Thinking is like a fountain. Once it gets going at a certain pressure, well, it almost impossible to turn it off. And, my hat! what odd things come up with the water!

("Out Of The Deep")”
― Walter de la Mare, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

“Just why it should have happened, or why it should have happened just when it did, he could not, of course, possibly have said; nor perhaps could it even have occurred to him to ask. The thing was above all a secret, something to be preciously concealed from Mother and Father; and to that very fact it owed an enormous part of its deliciousness. It was like a peculiarly beautiful trinket to be carried unmentioned in one's trouser-pocket - a rare stamp, an old coin, a few tiny gold links found trodden out of shape on the path in the park, a pebble of carnelian, a sea shell distinguishable from all others by an unusual spot or stripe-and, as if it were anyone of these, he carried around with him everywhere a warm and persistent and increasingly beautiful sense of possession. Nor was it only a sense of possession - it was also a sense of protection. It was as if, in some delightful way, his secret gave him a fortress, a wall behind which he could retreat into heavenly seclusion.

("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")”
― Conrad Aiken, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

“When indeed you positively press your face, so to speak, against the crystalline window of your eyes, your mind is apt to become a perfect vacuum.

("Out Of The Deep")”
― Walter de la Mare, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

“It was gentler here, softer, its seethe the quietest of whispers, as if, in deference to a drawing room, it had quite deliberately put on its 'manners'; it kept itself out of sight, obliterated itself, but distinctly with an air of saying, 'Ah, but just wait! Wait till we are alone together! Then I will begin to tell you something new! Something white! something cold! something sleepy! something of cease, and peace, and the long bright curve of space! Tell them to go away. Banish them. Refuse to speak. Leave them, go upstairs to your room, turn out the light and get into bed - I will go with you, I will be waiting for you, I will tell you a better story than Little Kay of the Skates, or The Snow Ghost - I will surround your bed, I will close the windows, pile a deep drift against the door, so that none will ever again be able to enter. Speak to them!...' It seemed as if the little hissing voice came from a slow white spiral of falling flakes in the corner by the front window - but he could not be sure.

("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")”
― Conrad Aiken, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

“And the mist of snow, as he had foreseen, was still on it - a ghost of snow falling in the bright sunlight, softly and steadily floating and turning and pausing, soundlessly meeting the snow that covered, as with a transparent mirage, the bare bright cobbles. He loved it - he stood still and loved it. Its beauty was paralyzing - beyond all words, all experience, all dream. No fairy-story he had ever read could be compared with it - none had ever given him this extraordinary combination of ethereal loveliness with a something else, unnameable, which was just faintly and deliciously terrifying.

("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")”
― Conrad Aiken, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

“That afternoon, with a sense of infinite relief, Pollock watched the flat swampy foreshore of Sulyma grow small in the distance. The gap in the long line of white surge became narrower and narrower. It seemed to be closing in and cutting him off from his trouble. The feeling of dread and worry began to slip from him bit by bit. At Sulyma belief in Porroh malignity and Porroh magic had been in the air, his sense of Porroh had been vast, pervading, threatening, dreadful. Now manifestly the domain of Porroh was only a little place, a little black band between the lea and the blue cloudy Mendi uplands.

("Pollock And The Porroh Man")”
― H.G. Wells, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

“The tales of pure terror, of course, are completely naturalistic in their content, and must stand or fall by their merit alone. But what about the supernatural stories? Can we, the children of a scientific age, give any credence to these medleys of devils, ghosts, and other psychical invasions? There is only one answer: we can and do. We are dealing with stories, not with scientific dissertations. And if, as stories, they have the ring of truth, we'll believe them, as stories, implicitly.

("Introduction")”
― Herbert A. Wise, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

“His indirect way of approaching a character or an action, striving to realize it by surrounding rather than invading it, is ideally suited to the indefinite and suggestive presentation of a ghost story.

(introduction to "Sir Edmund Orme" by Henry James)”
― Herbert A. Wise, Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural