When the Horror passing speech
Hunted us along,
Each laid hold on each, and each
Found the other strong.
In the teeth of things forbid
And reason overthrown,
Helen stood by me, she did,
Helen all alone.
–Rudyard Kipling
Resting immortal amongst the asphodels,
Resting immortal amongst the asphodels,
Resting immortal in visions wonder-drowned,
In Lethean ecstasy starlit bound,
Ageless, lost, locked away from the cruel world,
Showered in golden magic and glory crowned.
–CHALICE
HIS voice came to us again. He said, at first, that he saw nothing in the abyss below him. Then he gasped, swayed, and almost lost his balance. We could see the sweat standing out on his brow and neck, soaking his blue shirt. There were things in the abyss, he said in hoarse tones, great shapes that were like blobs of utter blackness, yet which he knew to be alive. From the central masses of their beings he could see them shoot forth incredibly long, filamentine tentacles. They moved themselves forward and backward — horizontally, but could not move vertically, it seemed. They were, he thought, nothing but living shadows.
Robert A.W. Lowndes (THE ABYSS)
From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this
sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.
–Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow)
Bark at the Moon, scream as a madman,
Five decades have past golden father of the dark,
Voice pure fire, pure blues in metal desire,
Spilled your sins as easily as blood on black altar,
Kept it real growing the red army to stay,
Kept them hypocrites screamin’ the Devil’s at play.
–KING OF DARKNESS
Ancient purple eyes see and comprehend,
Countless fires carved across your cosmic plains,
Whisper to me, tell me all that I have sought for in vain,
Before my mortal quest has come to an eternal end.
Let me see, let me feel the Universe at my eternal end!
–PURPLE IMMORTAL
‘No. The face of a dark, remarkable-looking man, in black, with black hair and a grey moustache – a handsome man except for a reserved and secret air. Not a face she ever saw, or at all like a face she ever saw. Doing nothing in the dream but looking at her fixedly, out of darkness.’–CHARLES DICKENS (To Be Read At Dusk)
“How say ye that I was lost? I wandered among roses.
Can he go astray that enters the rose garden?
The Lover in the house of the Beloved is not forlorn.
I wandered among roses. How say ye that I was lost?”
–ARTHUR MACHEN (Ornaments in Jade: The Rose Garden)
KING OF THE GARGOYLE album is roaring away!!!
Some of you—only a few, I confess—believe in the immortality of the soul, and in apparitions which you have not the honesty to call ghosts. –Ambrose Bierce (A Diagnosis of Death)
It is a nameless thing that I fear. –Charles M. Morrison (What Is It?)
The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and chuckled till he cried. —Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)
Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man’s. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal! –Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol)
Silent and deathly chilled was the night,
I found the golden-haired child who gave me a fright,
Her smile, Oh! Her ghostly innocent smile,
Haunted me ghostly in the twilight snow pile.
Haunted me forever in the twilight snow pile.
–Jeffrey LeBlanc
(Child in the Christmas Snow)
‘“None have understood it, not even those who experience the like. It is a chillness, a want of earnestness, a feeling as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor, a haunting perception of unreality! Thus seeming to possess all that other men have, all that men aim at, I have really possessed nothing, neither joy nor griefs. All things, all persons,—as was truly said to me at this table long and long ago,—have been like shadows flickering on the wall. It was so with my wife and children, with those who seemed my friends: it is so with yourselves, whom I see now before one. Neither have I myself any real existence, but am a shadow like the rest.’
–Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Christmas Banquet)
