Beth Teutschmann

31 Horror Literature Quotes To Keep You Up At Night

Monsters are real and often, they win.
Sade Andria Zabala
October 13, 2017
“I lay in bed and thought about how easy it was to hurt a person. It didn't have to be physical. All you had to do was take a good hard kick at something they cared about.”
— Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door
Tagged: Pain, Suffering
“Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.”
— Stephen King, The Shining
Tagged: Death, Love, Fear
“Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how.”
— Richard Matheson, Nightmare At 20,000 Feet: Horror Stories By Richard Matheson
Tagged: Death, Fear, creepy
“And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity”
— Stephen King, Pet Sematary
Tagged: Horror, humanity, creepy
“All I could think of when I got a look at the place from the outside was what fun it would be to stand out there and watch it burn down.”
— Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin Classics)
Tagged: Hatred, burn, creepy
“Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.”
— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
Tagged: Death, Time, Darkness
“The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts.”
— Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Tagged: zombies, Death
“He was soon born away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.”
— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Tagged: Famous Last Lines, Darkness
“Pieces of her ended up in the fridge. Inside the freezer, her lifeless eyes stare coldly at her heart— blaming it for her shortcomings.”
— John Robert L. Luna., Two Sentence Horror Stories
Tagged: Horror, Sex, scary
“When we look up at the clouds she sees an island, a puppy dog, Alaska, a tulip. I see, but don’t tell her, a Gucci money clip, an ax, a woman cut in two, a large puffy white puddle of blood that spreads across the sky, dripping over the city, onto Manhattan.”
— Patrick Bateman , American Psycho(Vintage Contemporaries)
Tagged: Seeing Evil
“I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.”
— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
Tagged: nightmares, Night Terrors, Afraid
“The truth is that monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes they win.”
— Stephen King, The Shining
Tagged: monsters, Ghosts
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Tagged: Fearless, Powerful
“The lips were as red as ever.
But there was no sign of movement, no pulse, no breath, no beating of the heart.”
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
Tagged: Horror Stories, Vampire
“Consequently, if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan's power comes from God and so that Satan is simply God's child, and that we are God's children also. There are no children of Satan, really.”
— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Tagged: Religion, God, Evil, Good, Vampire, Horror Stories, creepy
“God never talks. But the devil keeps advertising, Father. The devil does a lot of commercials.”
— William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist
Tagged: God, Horror Stories
“All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Dover Thrift Editions)
Tagged: Horror Stories
“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”
— Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (Hannibal Lecter)
Tagged: Cannibal, Horror Stories
“It's the people who aren't scared who die young.”
— Stephen King, Thinner
Tagged: Fear, Die, Death, Horror Stories
“I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.”
— Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle:(Penguin Orange Collection)
Tagged: Horror Stories, Death, scary
“We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't.”
— Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave: The First Book of the 5th Wave Series
Tagged: Horror Stories, Death, Dying, Fear Of Death, Reality Check, Fear
“We used to live in your house," George said.
"And now, guess what?" Jerry added. "Now we're dead in your house!’”
— R.L. Stine, Welcome To The Dead House
Tagged: Horror Stories, Haunted House
“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.”
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Tagged: Horror Stories, monsters, Fear
“Hungries toggle between two states. They’re frozen in place most of the time, just standing there like they’re never going to move again. Then they smell prey, or hear it, or catch sight of it, and they break into that terrifying dead sprint. No warm-up, no warning. Warp factor nine.”
— M.R. Carey, The Girl With All the Gifts
Tagged: Horror Stories, monsters, Zombie
“I saw something moving round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately distinguish. But I soon saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat. It appeared to me about four or five feet long for it measured fully the length of the hearthrug as it passed over it; and it continued to-ing and fro-ing with the lithe, sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you may suppose, I was terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes. I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast. I waked with a scream.”
— J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla: A Pomegranate Vintage Vampire Edition
Tagged: Nightmare, Horror Stories, Vampire, monsters
“With a thin black wand he was drawing designs on her body, dipping the wand's point in a cup of red held for him by a sun-browned man with a white moustache. The point moved back and forth across her stomach and down ticklingly to the insides of her thighs. The naked people were chanting--flat, unmusical, foreign-tongued syllables--and a flute or clarinet accompanied them.”
— Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby: A Novel(50th Anniversary Edition)
Tagged: Witchcraft, Horror Stories
“The favorite spectre of Sleepy Hollow, the Headless Horseman, who had been heard several times of late, patrolling the country; and, it was said, tethered his horse nightly among the graves in the churchyard.”
— Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories(Sterling Unabridged Classics)
Tagged: Horror Stories
“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.”
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque Of Red Death
Tagged: Apocalypse, Horror Stories
“As he crossed the entry hall, he had the feeling that the house was swallowing him alive.”
— Richard Matheson, Hell House
Tagged: Haunted House, Horror Stories, Paranoia, Claustrophobia
“She had a ghostly pallor and a dreadful expression, she wore clothes that were out of keeping with the styles of the present-day; she had kept her distance from me and she had not spoken. Something emanating from her still, silent presence, in each case by a grave, had communicated itself to me so strongly that I had felt indescribable repulsion and fear. And she had appeared and then vanished in a way that surely no real, living, fleshly human being could possibly manage to do.”
— Susan Hill, The Woman in Black(Acting Edition)
Tagged: Horror Stories, Ghost