The End of the Story Quotes

“Tell me tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love, in orbs whereto our sun is a nameless star, or unto which its rays have never reached.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The End Of The Story

“It would seem, from this, that the people of Omanorion had mastered the ultra-civilized art of minding their own business.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The End Of The Story

“Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently. Ney, tell me not of anything that lies between the bourns of time or the limits of space: for I am a little weary of all recorded years and charted lands; and the isles that are westward of Catay, and the sunset realms of Ind, are not remote enough to be made the abiding-place of my conceptions; and Atlantis is over-new for my thought to sojourn there, and Mu itself has gazed upon the sun in aeons that are to recent.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The End of the Story

“Malygris turned to the viper and spoke in a tone of melancholy reproof: “Why did you not warn me?” “Would the warning have availed?” was the counter-question. “All knowledge was yours, Malygris, excepting this one thing; and in no other way could you have learned it.” “What thing?” queried the magician. “I have learned nothing except the vanity of wisdom, the impotence of magic, the nullity of love, and the delusiveness of memory… Tell me, why could I not recall to life the same Nylissa whom I knew, or thought I knew?” “It was indeed Nylissa whom you summoned and saw,” replied the viper. “Your necromancy was potent up to this point; but no necromantic spell could recall for you your own lost youth or the fervent and guileless heart that loved Nylissa, or the ardent eyes that beheld her then. This, my master, was the thing that you had to learn.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The End Of The Story

“Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the watchful gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished, and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The End Of The Story

“the people were steeped in the crepuscular gloom of antiquity; and were wise with all manner of accumulated lore; and were subtle in the practice of strange refinements, of erudite perversities, of all that can shroud with artful opulence and grace and variety the bare uncouth cadaver of life, or hide from mortal vision the leering skull of death.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The End Of The Story

“adipocere of”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The End Of The Story

“I was with the first Venusian expedition, under the leadership of Admiral Carfax, in 1977.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The End Of The Story

“Within, there were several ponderous brazen-bound volumes of medieval date, a thin manuscript of yellowing parchment, and two portraits whose faces had been turned to the wall, as if it were unlawful for even the darkness of the sealed closet to behold them.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The End Of The Story

“It was mossed and lichened with antiquity; and there was a hint of beginning dilapidation in the time-worn stone of the walls. The formal garden had gone a little wild from neglect; the trimmed hedges and trees had taken on fantastic sprawling shapes; and evil, poisonous weeds had invaded the flower-beds. There were statues of cracked marble and verdigris-eaten bronze amid the shrubbery; there were fountains that had long ceased to flow; and dials on which the foliage-intercepted sun no longer fell.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The End Of The Story