Cosmic Horror Quotes

“The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters III: 1929-1931

“Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and felt and heard.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Come, then, City That Never Sleeps. Let me show you what lurks in the empty spaces where nightmares dare not tread.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Thing on the Doorstep

“I turn away and stare through the window at the field where the scotch broom creeps yellow as hell toward my doorstep. Six years and it has advanced from the hinterlands to the picket fence in the back yard. Six more years and it will have chewed this house to the foundation, braided my bones in its hair.”
― Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories

“In Nevada I could feel the Long Crisis with a terrifying intimacy, as if it was some sort of uncanny, bodily contact— like the feeling you get camped out in the swirling, galaxy-littered darkness of the open range when a reptile brushes up against your prostrate body. Except that the reptile at least shares with you some deep, serpentine connection, a lineage lost somewhere in the plummet of primeval time. The Crisis, on the other hand, is a vast creature, not contained by familiar scales of time or space. It is a social terror made of masses of machinery and animals, yet not in any way kin to these components. And what we sense of it today is merely one of its many limbs extending backward from its true body writhing somewhere just out of sight, at home in our own incomprehensible future.”
― Phillip Neel, Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict

“For thin is the veil betwixt man and the godless deep. The skies are haunted by that which it were madness to know; and strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies. Unnameable things have come to us in alien horror and will come again. And the evil of the stars is not as the evil of earth.”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The Beast Of Averoigne

“A fear of cosmic indifference seemed comical, or downright naive....Beyond them he saw the police forces at the barricade as they muscled the crowd of Negroes back; he saw the decaying facade of his tenement with new eyes; he saw the patrol cars parked in the middle of the road like three great black hounds waiting to pounce on all these gathered sheep. What was indifference compared to malice?”
― Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom

“One senses that it is a region of cosmic antiquity, and that man is no more significant here than any other of the insects that crawl in the dust.”
― Mark Samuels, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales

“Markedly defective individuals (of the Great Race) were quickly disposed of as soon as their defects were noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense of touch or of physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out of Time

“I saw the body spread on that dank stone,
And knew those things which feasted were not men;
I knew this strange, grey world was not my own,
But Yuggoth, past the starry voids—and then
The body shrieked at me with a dead cry,
And all too late I knew that it was I!”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems

“Jeremy watches the intergeek distances increase, the outward expansion of geeks, from the central point where they were all clustered just now, out into the dark unknown, like a slow-motion geek explosion. Like the Big Bang of geekdom.”
― S.R. Thomas, Geeks Beyond Time

“But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City

“I hate puppets. Hate them. They descend from a demonic line parallel to mimes and clowns and are wholly of the devil, especially the lifelike variety.”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“He senses something wrong. He sees nothing, hears nothing, yet feels surrounded, then enveloped, by a presence of undiluted evil. He is immobilized.

Then a savage merging of oblivion and agony, as if buried alive in a living expanse of living, malignant soil invading the self, violating him, becoming him. Every fiber, every atom, strains with the effort to expel it, to escape.”
― Arthur Shattuck O'Keefe, The Spirit Phone

“There are no gods, only teeth.”
― Aaron Dries, Dirty Heads

“I thought it was the quiet screwing with my imagination, and the isolation, and the bigness of it--how much of the world I could see laid out in front of me. And how time seemed to be holding its breath. As if everything would stay the way it was forever, with sunset not more than forty minutes away and the sun sitting red over the horizon and that faded clarity in the air. I thought it was those things that were making me see faces where there was nothing but coincidence. I think differently now, but now it's too late.”
― Stephen King, N.

“I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind- of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in Darkness: Collected Stories Volume 1

“She’s part of the nothing now.” Hot tears flooded Monique’s cheeks. She tried to swallow the burning lump in her throat. “We fed her to the empty place.”
“No, No Lady smiled wide and shook her head. “Most of the universe is empty. We feel stretches of the worm, and she’s with him now, and full and infinatellsetsfree-”
Her words smashed together and thinned like Phoebe across time, becoming nothing.”
― Hailey Piper, The Worm and His Kings

“The goat let out a god awful high pitched scream as it impaled itself on the shotgun barrel.
Shelton pushed the safety to the off position and fired.
Goat fur and blood splattered the inside of his Jeep”
― Mark Dossett, Exit 999

“As he drove down the claustrophobic corridor of khaki colored corn stalks the wicked witch was quickly replaced by Michael Myers. Who better to walk out into the middle of the road at that point. Ok, maybe Leatherface or even Jason Voorhees. The more he let his childhood nightmares fill his mind the faster he drove. The house kept growing in size as he got closer.”
― Mark Dossett, Exit 999

“[...] fun for me was sneaking off to peer into a tidal pool, to grasp the intricacies of the creatures that lived there. Sustenance for me was tied to ecosystem and habitat, orgasm the sudden realization of the interconnectivity of living things. Observation had always meant more to me than interaction. He knew all of this, I think. But I never could express myself that well to him, although I did try, and he did listen. And yet, I was nothing but expression in other ways. My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease. Even a bar was a type of ecosystem, if a crude one, and to someone entering, someone without my husband’s agenda, that person could have seen me sitting there and had no trouble imagining that I was happy in my little bubble of silence. Would have had no trouble believing I fit in [...]”
― Jeff VanderMeer

“To the North of this, in the direction of the West, I saw The Place Where The Silent Ones Kill; and this was so named, because there, maybe ten thousand years gone, certain humans adventuring from the Pyramid, came off the Road Where The Silent Ones Walk, and into that place, and were immediately destroyed. And this was told by one who escaped; though he died also very quickly, for his heart was frozen. And this I cannot explain; but so it was set out in the Records.”
― William Hodgenson

“His awareness of this life would ultimately become but a dream to him--a series of fading images and memories and feelings that he would not be able to take with him. His entire life would become just like all the rest of the dreams he'd already forgotten.”
― Eric A. Reynolds, The Wild Dead West: Liberation of the Left-Behind, Pt. I

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”
― Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest

“Shub Niggurath, Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. Her love is felt across the cosmos and we happily fall under Her warm, eldritch embrace. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Iä! Shub-Niggurath!”
― Emily Wyeth, Mother's Milk

“The measurements of space and time, the photographs of far stars and of points of light which proved to be composed of thousands of stars, filled him with an awe which felt like the edge of a delicious panic.”
― Ramsey Campbell, Midnight Sun

“The grass inside that rough grouping did look a bit patchy and yellow compared to the thigh-high greenery in the rest of the field (it stretches down to a wide acreage of mixed oaks, firs, and birches), but it was by no means dead. What caught my attention closer by was a little cluster of sumac bushes. Those weren't dead, either--at least I don't think so, but the leaves were black instead of green-streaked-with-red, and they had no shape. They were ill-formed things, somehow hard to look at. They offended the order the eye expected. I can't put it any better than that.”
― Stephen King, N.

“The day was fading. The sun was a ball of red gas, flattened at the top and bottom, sitting above the western horizon. The river was a long, bloody snake in its reflected glow, eight or ten miles distant, but the sound of it carrying to me on the still evening air. Blue-gray woods rose behind it in a series of ridges to the far horizon. I couldn't see a single house or road. Not a bird sang. It was as if I'd been tumbled back four hundred years in time. Or four million. The first white streamers of groundmist were rising out of the hay--which was high. Nobody had been in there to cut it, although that was a big field, and good graze. The mist came out of the darkening green like breath. As if the earth itself was alive.”
― Stephen King, N.