Horror Quotes

The scariest horror quotes from literature.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, 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.”
– The Haunting of Hill house by Shirley Jackson.

“I will show them. I will do what I did that once. I will screech and laugh loud. I will run on the walls. Last I will hang head down by all my legs and laugh and drip green all over until they are sorry they didn’t be nice to me. If they try to beat me again I’ll hurt them. I will.”
(Born of Man and Woman by Richard Matheson)

“Rags and bones, young gentlemen: all four of ’em: flutterin’ rags and whity bones. It seemed to me as if I could hear ’em clackin’ as they got along. Very slow they went, and lookin’ from side to side.” “What were their faces like? Could you see?” “They hadn’t much to call faces,” said the shepherd, “but I could seem to see as they had teeth.”
(The Wailing Well by M.R. James)

“So the Drews had a new barn and fine new livestock and they hired four men. But they didn’t have Alton. And they didn’t have Kimbo. And Babe screams at night and has grown very thin.”
(It by Theodore Sturgeon)

“For a moment, a moment only, I stared at the dark and repugnant visage, with its stary, corpse-white eyes, viscid and malignant, its flat simian nose, hairy ears, and thick black tongue that seemed to leap up at me from out of the mouth. The face moved as I watched it, wriggled and squirmed revoltingly, while the head itself shifted its position, turning slightly to one side and revealing a profile even more bestial and gangrenous and unclean than the brunt of its countenance.”
(Second Night Out by Frank Belknap Long)

“I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.”
(I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison)

“It walked in the woods. It was never born. It existed. Under the pine needles the fires burn, deep and smokeless in the mold. In heat and darkness and decay there is growth. There is life and there is growth. It grew but it was not alive….”
– It by Theodore Sturgeon

“Henry came to his feet suddenly, looking dazed. He walked forward a few steps, his eyes traveling from one to the other of them, yet apparently not seeing them. He began to speak abruptly, in an unnatural child-like voice.“The snow,” he mumered, “the snow – the beautiful hands, so little, so lovely – her beautiful hands – and the snow, the beautiful, lovely snow, drifting and falling about her….”He turned slowly and looked toward the French windows, the others following his gaze. Beyond was a wall of white, where the snow was drifting against the house. For a moment Henry stood quietly watching then suddenly a white figure came forward from the snow – a young girl, cloaked in long snow-whips, her glistening eyes strangely fascinating.”
(The Drifting Snow by August Derleth)
“It was on the second-floor landing that they found the shoe, with the man’s foot still in it, much like the last morsel of a mouse which sometimes falls unnoticed from the side of the jaws of the cat.”
Thus I Refute Beelzy by John Collier

“She thought she heard a sound behind her — fragile, skittering. Amelia turned. The sound had stopped. She felt a chill move up the backs of her legs. “It’s He Who Kills,” she said with a smile.”
— Prey by Richard Matheson

“A cold hand fell on Louis’s shoulder. Rachel’s voice was grating, full of dirt ‘Darling’ it said.”
—Stephen King, Pet Semetary

“He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”
(The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe)

A scrap of flesh falls from my rotting face, as I turn from the window, my eyes blinded by tears. She was mine. She was mine…
“Love Me, Love Me, Love Me”

“She fell writhing on the floor. Already her face was nothing but a red rag. Then he straightened himself, stumbled over her, felt about the wall to find the switch, and put out the light. And round them, as in them, was a great Darkness…”
(The Last Kiss by Maurice Level)

“The attic lock melted. The door opened. Mink peered inside, tall blue shadows behind her. ‘Peek-a-boo,’ said Mink.”
(Zero Hour by Ray Bradbury)

“You who sit in your houses of nights, you who sit in the theaters, you who are gay at dances and parties–all you who are enclosed by four wall–you have no conception of what goes on outside in the dark. In the lonesome places.”
(The Lonesome Place by August Derleth)

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
(The Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft)

‘A bowl of Biskies makes a growing boy.’ They were the last words he ever read.”

“Behind her in the darkness of the living room, someone cleared his throat…”

“The man screamed and clawed frantically, like a drowning swimmer. The screaming filled the universe.”
(Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury)

“For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.”
(The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe)

“‘No,’ Louise gasped. There was a scraping of her chair, wildly, in the dark. ‘No. Don’t turn on the lights, oh, God, God, God, don’t turn them on, please, don’t turn on the lights, don’t!’ Louise was shrieking now. The entire cellar froze with the scream. Nobody moved. Everyone sat in the dark cellar, suspended in the suddenly frozen task of this October game; the wind blew outside, banging the house, the smell of pumpkins and apples filled the room with the smell of the objects in their fingers while one boy cried, ‘I’ll go upstairs and look!’ and he ran upstairs hopefully and out around the house, four times around the house, calling, ‘Marion, Marion, Marion!’ over and over and at last coming slowly down the stairs into the waiting breathing cellar and saying to the darkenss, ‘I can’t find her.’ Then… some idiot turned on the lights.”
(The October Game by Ray Bradbury)