Eldritch Location Quotes

“In the interrogation room, silence was used as torture. But it was an invisible cruelty. No law prohibited.

A few hours earlier, in the same place where Michael Ivanovich had been, Simon Berish was now locked up. Unlike the others who had passed through the room, he knew the reason why the white walls were covered with sound-absorbing material. The principle was that of an "anechoic chamber," where sounds cannot penetrate. The body compensates for the absence by creating artificial noises—tinnitus, ringing. As time passes, one becomes less and less able to distinguish reality, from the imagination.”
― Donato Carrisi;, L'ipotesi del male

“Imagine a crown of thorns, twisted, dark and unreflective, grown too thickly tangled to ever rest on any human head. Put it in orbit around a failed star whose own reflected half-light does little more than throw its satellites into silhouette. Occasional bloody highlights glinted like dim embers from its twists and crannies; they only emphasized the darkness everywhere else.

Imagine an artefact that embodies the very notion of torture, something so wrenched and disfigured that even across uncounted lightyears and unimaginable differences in biology and outlook, you can't help but feel that somehow, the structure itself is in pain.

Now make it the size of a city”
― Peter Watts , Blindsight

“The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous. And within that boundary, darkness swirled. It was more than an absence. She could sense a structure within it, layers interpenetrating, like shadows casting shadows. It throbbed with an inhuman power, tidal and deep and painful. Look at this too long, Elvi thought, and I will lose my mind in it. She took a step toward it, feeling the structures in the blackness respond to her. She felt as if she could see the spaces between molecules in the air, like atoms themselves had become a thin fog, and for the first time she could see the true shape of reality looming up just beyond her reach.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“there, on the fifth corner, is Les Deux Magots.
The cafe's green awning flaps frantically, pushed outward by a rushing wind from within. Around it are tables and chairs, all heaving up and suspended as if about to fly away; then spasming back to their positions on the ground. Up again, head-height and back. As they have jumped for years. The windows are blown out repeatedly, surrounded by broken glass that twitches and snaps back into the panes and then out again, repeatedly, an oscillating instant of combustion. The café rumbles.
Sam walks heavily toward it, into the empty road around it. It looks as if the air exhausts her, as if she walks against a gale. She stops, gasping, still meters from the entrance. The air rushes in Thibault's ears.
It was from here that the S-Blast came.”
― China Miéville, The Last Days of New Paris

“The Faerie side of the manor was not built for humans, and sometimes the hallways did not lead straight on to anything. Rather, they spiraled like dreams, making a sharp turn here or a looping reversal there. The ceilings were so low they nearly scraped the top of my head, and the stones beneath my feet were unevenly placed. Torches flickered and smoked in the walls, granting the place the air of a dungeon. No one knew when the Fae had built the eastern wing, but it felt ancient. I had sometimes imagined the rooms carved out of time itself.”
― Jessica Cluess, A Sorrow Fierce and Falling

“This is my hirac delest my final statement. I have formed the mental link to the thought-speak transponder in my fighter's computer. I will record my memories before the Yeerks annihilate all trace of me.

If this message someday reaches the Andalite world, I want the truth to be known. I am called a great warrior. A hero. But there is a great deal that no Andalite knows about me. I have not lied, but I have kept the truth a secret.
This is not my first visit to Earth. I spent many years on Earth ... and yet, no time at all.
I landed here now in this construction site because I was looking for a great weapon: the Time Matrix.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Andalite Chronicles

“The area around the tower of Al Khali, under the relentless magical bombardment, was already drifting beyond that reality horizon where time, space and matter lose their separate identities and start wearing each other's clothes. It was quite impossible to describe.
Here is what it looked like.
It looked like a piano sounds shortly after being dropped down a well. It tasted yellow, and felt paisley. It smelled like a total eclipse of the moon. Of course, nearer to the tower it got really weird.”
― Terry Pratchett , Sourcery

“This City," I thought, "is so horrific that its mere existence, the mere fact of its having endured — even in the middle of a secret desert — pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this City endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous." I do not want to describe it; a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull pullulating with teeth, organs, and heads monstrously yoked together yet hating each other — those might, perhaps, be approximate images.”
― Jorge Luis Borges , El inmortal

“Mom looked out of the front window, across the darkened road, across Henderson's darkened wheatfield to the vast, endless, gray nothingness in which the little village of Peaksville floated like a soul-the huge nothingness that was evident at night, when Anthony's brassy day had gone.”
― Jerome Bixby, It's a Good Life

“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