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

“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

“Here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another scheme of life, another evolution not parallel to the human. And in the end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we would be drawn across the frontier into their world.”
― Algernon Blackwood, The Willows

“The winter night began to wall itself in with black bricks of nothingness. Infinite expanses condensed into deaf, blind rock: a heavy, impenetrable mass growing into the space between things. The world congealed into nothingness.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“Don’t you want to pierce the veil of the gods? To look at that which cannot be seen because it cannot really exist, and yet does?”
― Toby R. Beeny, The Babel Project

“…it reaches for me with tendrils that turn to hands then claws. There are faces in it, so many human faces, screaming and retching and crying and stunned by an enormous pain. There are eyes everywhere and mouths and rows of teeth, endless, row on row, back into its depths.”
― Sheri Singerling, Nytho

“Myth or otherwise, the sculptures told of the coming of those star-headed things to the nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space.”
― H.P Lovecraft

“He whispered
That my plan was misconceived
That my special plan for this world was a terrible mistake
Because, he said, there is nothing to do and there is no where to go
There is nothing to be and there is no one to know
Your plan is a mistake, he repeated
This world is a mistake, I replied”
― Thomas Ligotti, I Have a Special Plan for This World

“The universe shimmers with a terrible silence. A time of no song comes. I must admit, my soul feels relief at departing before it claims Verpace.”
― Steven Raaymakers, Blade of the Wanderer

“There is a paradigm shift. A moebius space, time a ball, I, a bed of nails. I sleep a dreamless sleep, and the others sleep with me. Then, there is a light from all around, its source intangible, its touch the lifting of a blanket in a fridge.”
― David G. Csontos, Earthbound

“The machine’s heart beats a stable rhythm. I a cell, let it carry me. One with one, one with all. Me a pilgrim, please let my steps tread light. One with one, one with all.”
― David G. Csontos, Earthbound

“True monsters are not malevolent: rather, they are of the mindset that humanity is beneath consideration. Humanity is to them as insects are to us.”
― Jacob Graham

“First, conjure the island: mountains of calcified sea skeletons latching onto an underwater volcanic peak, the latching upon each other, layer upon layer, eon after eon, until the cadaverous mass rises from the ocean. This is a scene million years in the making.”
― J.A.J. Minton, Discovery

“Perhaps superhuman beings used us as we used animals, for food and work— a different sort of food and work. Perhaps they used our physical or mental forces in some way. We killed animals’ bodies. Perhaps they killed or tampered with people’s minds ; so that they went mad. We were being put to work, harnessed— or some of us were: the ones they wanted.

And these superior beings might be used by beings superior to them— like that Chinese picture of everything preying on everything, from the lowest upwards. . . . But, used or not used, he was not going on any longer...

("The Shadow")”
― E.H. Visiak

“The Tentacled Maws by Stewart Stafford

Unhook the mind,
Put honesty in dispute,
From chosen blood,
Comes officious brute.

Tentacled things taking,
Malicious, maladroit maws,
In a hubris blizzard blind,
Behind lupine power doors.

Irradiated golden pockets,
Ragged wretches starving,
Dynasties sprouting weeds,
Names on plaques for carving.

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I play the seven-stringed guitar by the fountain in the municipal square. I use my knife and fork to slice the steak. In the cathedral, I describe the teachings of the Goddess to the believers. I reach out my right hand and leave the carriage with the help of a gentleman. I get the new dress I had been eyeing for so long, and I can't wait to change into it. I stride forward with my four legs as I'm being chased by a child. I laugh loudly as I totter about and play with a dog…

Suddenly, we tremble. We look up into the sky and see illusory, thin lines drilling out from our bodies. They extend to an infinite height, extending beyond the grayish-white fog. They extend into an ancient palace and land in the hands of a tall figure shrouded in fog.”
― Cuttlefish That Loves Diving, Lord of the Mysteries Volume 7

“The library at Hellebore, however, was different. Appendage to the main campus, it acted only in the faculty's interest, which seemed to revolve exclusively around fucking us students over.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Library at Hellebore

“The real universe is just that black. 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. But in this dark forest, there's a stupid child called humanity, who has built a bonfire and is standing beside it shouting, 'Here I am! Here I am!”
― Liu Cixin , The Dark Forest

“It’s a song, and it’s war drums, and it’s science too. It’s experiments. It’s rapture. And it saw me. It saw right through me. I saw the whole world and it’s so empty.”
― Lucian Arther, The Lights of Erde-Zwei

“Together then. Together, and sealed it with a kiss that tasted of copper and starlight.”
― Michal Polgar, Krelløy: A Lovecraftian Horror Novel of Arctic Isolation and Cosmic Annihilation

“What was this world? In what petrified and strange insanity was I given to live? Would I survive long enough to find the answer? To find the exit? Would I ever understand, from the core of my loneliness, this otherworldly apparatus that was my life? And suddenly, in the concrete, empty teachers’ lounge—with its large table covered with red cloth, with its cabinet for the registers, with its mold-stained paintings—I was enveloped in a fear that I had never felt before, even in my most terrifying dreams; not of death, not of suffering, not of terrible diseases, not of the sun going dark, but fear at the thought that I will never understand, that my life was not long enough and my mind not good enough to understand. That I had been given many signs and I didn’t know how to read them. That like everyone else I will rot in vain, in my sins and stupidity and ignorance, while the dense, intricate, overwhelming riddle of the world will continue on, clear as though it were in your hand, as natural as breathing, as simple as love, and it will flow into the void, pristine and unsolved.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid

“The Behemoth & The Godspawn Surfer by Stewart Stafford

Jagged flesh in the behemoth's belly,
The city encircled by its tongue's pall,
I drank toxic fumes and pumice smoke,
As I tried surfing along a lava waterfall.

My obsidian bone board, surging fire,
Cryptid blood drips from a snapping jaw,
In a flash of the beast's fungal jawline,
I counted the vacant dead within its maw.

In a blaze, I was in its mouth and deeper,
I rounded the gullet's scalding turn,
Into a sea of swirling bones, stomach bile,
Where half-chewed skyscrapers churn.

"Leave me, Godspawn!" the monster roared,
"Spoil not my prey feasting for my fangs to cut!"
My board speared into its festering heart,
It ejected me in a howling thunderclap of sulphur soot.

And hurled me skyward, sand-blasted, and bruised,
The plume cleared, and the beast stood, wound-free—
Lava floods scorched, the city’s debt — a lifeblood hue,
By sunrise, my perennial task returned to enslave me.

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I recommend leaving this universe.”
― Bert-Oliver Boehmer, Galacticide

“I think humanity will be just fine without you.”
― Stewart Chisham, Hudsonville - What Lies Beneath: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy

“The part of us that's me argues about that; who defines love, what is love, isn't it all just chemical crap, invented by us, bought and sold by humans?
The part of us that's Axa tells me to shut up and LOVE, dammit.”
― Drew Huff, My Name Isn't Paul