Gothic Horror Quotes

“This girl who was soft at heart, who was both the vast, dark woods and the glorious light of a full moon, who was angry at all the thousand tiny ways she’d been hurt in her life.”
― Laura Steven, The Society For Soulless Girls

“At its heart, Gothic Fiction is the introvert's "Hero's Journey" where heroes and heroines must navigate the uncharted territory of the mind in order to solve the mystery of their life's adventure.”
― Barrymore Tebbs

“Must beauty blossom, rooted in decay,
And night devour its flaming hues alway?”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies

“The original Gothic horror tales focused on personalities deformed through loneliness. Ghouls, vampires, werewolves: all made, not born. But the isolation? Are even such as these ever truly alone? Perhaps the psyche has always been more complex than that, desire eternally more potent than terror. Surely, none prowl entirely in solitude.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“Vijaya prefers to eat alone. Rob ushered her into the room and held a chair for her, then sat across from her. "Many Indians regard eating as something that should be done in private. Considering the table manners of some of our best people, one can see their point."

Patricia Frances Rowell”
― Patricia Frances Rowell

“He seemed so confident that I, remembering my own confidence two nights before and with the baneful result, felt awe and vague terror. It must have been my weakness that made me hesitate to tell it to my friend, but I felt it all the more, like unshed tears.”
― Bram Stoker, Bram Stoker's Dracula

“What would you rather have me do? Should I serve opium? Serve food? Serve myself? What else do you think I’m qualified for?

I could serve my husband. Hope he doesn’t drink or smoke or gamble or beat me. Have four babies before I’m twenty-five and say I’m blessed if two live to adulthood. Bury the rest from starvation or miscarriage, illness or injury, or my heaven-blessed husband shaking one too hard when he gets home late and they won’t stop crying. You think that’s the better choice?”
― Lianyu Tan, The Wicked and the Willing

“Darkness weaved with uncertainty all around me, yet determination slowly started to seep into my veins.”
― Lilith Fury, In the darkness we share

“There was something so strange in all this, something so weird and impossible to imagine, that there grew on me a sense of my being in some way the sport of opposite forces - the mere vague idea of which seemed in a way to paralyse me. I was certainly under some form of mysterious protection. From a distant country had come, in the very nick of time, a message that took me out of the danger of the snow-sleep and the jaws of the wolf.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula's Guest

“How strange the heart was, capable of making you lose your head over a monster.”
― Aran Maza, Garden Of Shadows

“Now the truth is, I felt rather unaccountably to the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said, “drawn towards her,” but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging.”
― J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmila

“If you’d just let me have you...
Hold you.
Taste you.
I can show you the depths where pain becomes pleasure.”
― Lianyu Tan, The Wicked and the Willing

“You might think that because my blood runs colder than yours, I have no heart, but the opposite is true. If anything, I feel too deeply, love too much.”
― Lianyu Tan

“You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after.”
― Sheridan Le Fanu

“Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“I mean, we all have our dark days. Very dark days, sometimes. When our demons come out to play. No one lives entirely in the light, right?”
― Mona Awad, Rouge

“Welcome to my house. Come freely; and leave something of the happiness you bring”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“I want you. All of you. I adore seeing you writhe beneath me. Feeling you come undone in my arms. I’ll never tire of that.”
― Lianyu Tan, The Wicked and the Willing

“You think you love her. You think, if this is love, you don’t know anything.”
― Lianyu Tan, The Wicked and the Willing

“If I could only save one person… if I could save you, maybe my life would mean something. Why won’t you let me save you?”
― Lianyu Tan, The Wicked and the Willing

“A medida que mis nervios se relajaban y me familiarizaba con aquel extraño fenómeno (estoy convencido de que el cerebro humano termina por asimilar cualquier cosa), la impresión de que una desgraciada y miserable criatura se paseaba de un lado a otro de la puerta vacía era cada vez más fuerte.”
― Mrs. Oliphant, The Open Door

“We soon fell silent too, and above and around us came the murmur of all the countless branches; a distant sort of a noise, ungraspable yet pervasive, like voices in another room.”
― Sally Hinchcliffe, Hare House

“You thought that you knew me so well. But if you did, you’d have known that I never turned away from my trauma. I paid attention. I took it all in. Every single detail. I owned my pain. It wasn’t separate from me. It was me. I was it. The fact that you even thought that you could hurt me, to feed on me, to use me… and believe that that was enough for me to kill you… shows just how little you understand. Every time I gave you my pain, I held back. Each and every time. I held back because I cared. You only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. You want my pain? Take it. Take it all. Take what I have learned to live with all my life. This time I won’t hold back.”
― Lilith Fury, In the darkness we share

“It's almost amusing, in a dark and twisted way, how I've spent my whole life tip-toeing around sharp edges - forever trying to outfox fate just to survive. Now, as if life has come full circle, I find myself intentionally steering into the eye of the storm.”
― Lilith Fury, In the darkness we share

“Something about this place rots people. It rots people from the inside.”
― M.T. O'Neill, Fairhaven Falls

“She had a powerful, dangerous, serpentine beauty.”
― Aran Maza, Garden Of Shadows

“The darkness and the night made her see monsters where there were only shadows, screams where a creaking door opened, whispers where the wind swayed.”
― Aran Maza, Garden Of Shadows

“All spirits come out at night, they like the dark, they hide in the shadows.”
― Aran Maza, Garden Of Shadows

“His face had grown dark, except for the reflection of the red fire in his eyes. The house, too, seemed to have filled with shadow, as if a storm was brewing outside. Jim’s eyes beamed red from the shadows. Why wasn’t he moving? Why wasn’t he helping his son?”
― NP Cunniffe, The Weejee Man

“Imagine that, surrounded by your loved ones, you and your disease-riddled body have finally just breathed your last. No, scratch that. It’s really much more vile than that, because, even though you still had much life left in you, you’ve just been put to death, and not just in the most painful of ways, but, treacherously, by those whom you thought truly loved you, or, if not that, then, at the least, valued and respected you!
Fortunately, or unfortunately, you disappear into the mists of time, and that means neither you nor your beloved face will ever be seen again. That one of those who had so cruelly abused you might ever try to track you down, or even be able to, is not possible, right? No, of course not, because, as we all know, birth is the beginning and death is the end of all that ever accidently took place in between.
Whether birth is the beginning and death actually the end, it certainly is how the badly disfigured, yet somehow still disturbingly alluring, Virginia Finsterwald thinks. So, when a dying lady shows up at her door - with a duplicate version of her own previously perfect face - it would be impossible for the former spy, now private detective, to take this event as anything more than mere Happenstance.
Meanwhile, just a couple of blocks up the way, Virginia’s principal patron is confronted by a woman who, inexplicably, has the exact face of his aunt, only, she had been lynched when he was a child! As a highly educated man who believes only in materials and reason, the only way Alistair Alligood, the a multi-zillionaire collector of gender-dysphorick pubescent boys, can prevent being undone by this unsettling matter is by writing it off, and yet:------does he really believe that such an occurrance is mere Happenstance?
Maybe so, but, what is not mere Happenstance are the church exorcists, psychicks, mesmerists, physicians, psychologists, and mediums who, when Alistair Alligood falls gravely ill, war with each other over whether he is bodily ill, suffering from past-life trauma, under a witch’s spell, and or is it that he has become demon possessed? What unravels behind the curtain of Alistair’s malady is a centuries’long tale of Poisonings, Duels, Rape, Revenge, Possession, the Black Arts, and Taboo Familial Doings, the seeds of which will miscegenize and explode in ’Beyond The Last Breath’.”
― Richarson-South