Gothic Horror Quotes

“This girl who was soft at heart, who was both the vast, dark woods and the glorious light of a full moon, who was angry at all the thousand tiny ways she’d been hurt in her life.”
― Laura Steven, The Society For Soulless Girls

“Must beauty blossom, rooted in decay,
And night devour its flaming hues alway?”
― Clark Ashton Smith, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies

“At its heart, Gothic Fiction is the introvert's "Hero's Journey" where heroes and heroines must navigate the uncharted territory of the mind in order to solve the mystery of their life's adventure.”
― Barrymore Tebbs

“The original Gothic horror tales focused on personalities deformed through loneliness. Ghouls, vampires, werewolves: all made, not born. But the isolation? Are even such as these ever truly alone? Perhaps the psyche has always been more complex than that, desire eternally more potent than terror. Surely, none prowl entirely in solitude.”
― Robert Dunbar, Martyrs and Monsters

“How strange the heart was, capable of making you lose your head over a monster.”
― Aran Maza, Garden Of Shadows

“Darkness weaved with uncertainty all around me, yet determination slowly started to seep into my veins.”
― Lilith Fury, In the darkness we share

“Welcome to my house. Come freely; and leave something of the happiness you bring”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“There was something so strange in all this, something so weird and impossible to imagine, that there grew on me a sense of my being in some way the sport of opposite forces - the mere vague idea of which seemed in a way to paralyse me. I was certainly under some form of mysterious protection. From a distant country had come, in the very nick of time, a message that took me out of the danger of the snow-sleep and the jaws of the wolf.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula's Guest

“I mean, we all have our dark days. Very dark days, sometimes. When our demons come out to play. No one lives entirely in the light, right?”
― Mona Awad, Rouge

“She had a powerful, dangerous, serpentine beauty.”
― Aran Maza, Garden Of Shadows

“The darkness and the night made her see monsters where there were only shadows, screams where a creaking door opened, whispers where the wind swayed.”
― Aran Maza, Garden Of Shadows

“Now the truth is, I felt rather unaccountably to the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said, “drawn towards her,” but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging.”
― J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmila

“Something about this place rots people. It rots people from the inside.”
― M.T. O'Neill, Fairhaven Falls

“All spirits come out at night, they like the dark, they hide in the shadows.”
― Aran Maza, Garden Of Shadows

“His face had grown dark, except for the reflection of the red fire in his eyes. The house, too, seemed to have filled with shadow, as if a storm was brewing outside. Jim’s eyes beamed red from the shadows. Why wasn’t he moving? Why wasn’t he helping his son?”
― NP Cunniffe, The Weejee Man

“Imagine that, surrounded by your loved ones, you and your disease-riddled body have finally just breathed your last. No, scratch that. It’s really much more vile than that, because, even though you still had much life left in you, you’ve just been put to death, and not just in the most painful of ways, but, treacherously, by those whom you thought truly loved you, or, if not that, then, at the least, valued and respected you!
Fortunately, or unfortunately, you disappear into the mists of time, and that means neither you nor your beloved face will ever be seen again. That one of those who had so cruelly abused you might ever try to track you down, or even be able to, is not possible, right? No, of course not, because, as we all know, birth is the beginning and death is the end of all that ever accidently took place in between.
Whether birth is the beginning and death actually the end, it certainly is how the badly disfigured, yet somehow still disturbingly alluring, Virginia Finsterwald thinks. So, when a dying lady shows up at her door - with a duplicate version of her own previously perfect face - it would be impossible for the former spy, now private detective, to take this event as anything more than mere Happenstance.
Meanwhile, just a couple of blocks up the way, Virginia’s principal patron is confronted by a woman who, inexplicably, has the exact face of his aunt, only, she had been lynched when he was a child! As a highly educated man who believes only in materials and reason, the only way Alistair Alligood, the a multi-zillionaire collector of gender-dysphorick pubescent boys, can prevent being undone by this unsettling matter is by writing it off, and yet:------does he really believe that such an occurrance is mere Happenstance?
Maybe so, but, what is not mere Happenstance are the church exorcists, psychicks, mesmerists, physicians, psychologists, and mediums who, when Alistair Alligood falls gravely ill, war with each other over whether he is bodily ill, suffering from past-life trauma, under a witch’s spell, and or is it that he has become demon possessed? What unravels behind the curtain of Alistair’s malady is a centuries’long tale of Poisonings, Duels, Rape, Revenge, Possession, the Black Arts, and Taboo Familial Doings, the seeds of which will miscegenize and explode in ’Beyond The Last Breath’.”
― Richarson-South

“The Devil's Chapel by Stewart Stafford

Spires writhing in audacity's sky,
Laced masonry's Faustian high,
The Devil's Chapel invites by lie,
Embalmed, a cracked stone altar dry.

The golden Madonna rises above all,
Lucifer's War, in stained glass, tall,
In horned shadow, the angelic fall,
Dark kingdom formed of a lightning ball.

Bartholomew flayed by sadistic chagrin,
Bones laid bare, devotion anchored within,
Skin in the game took centuries to win,
Gargoyles leer in the paying tourist din.

Behind the veil of confession wood,
The all-seeing eye drips with blood,
Trickster's snare in nightmare's flood,
A gift shop trades where sacrifice stood.

Pungent echoes in incense crawl,
Catacombs beckon entombed gall,
To witness ornate veneration's pall,
Silent to a martyr's last breath call.

Croziers rest in chilled silver's display,
As pink-veined marble taints today.

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

“At such a young age, I learned that there’s a limit to one’s soul on how many chances you can give somebody to right their wrongs.
- Rose (Sweet Nectar, Book 1).”
― H'deel Batnij

“I learned that being invisible doesn’t get anybody anywhere to where they want to go. It doesn’t make anyone grow from being chained from all their traumas and anxieties.
Sometimes, we must force ourselves to be set free. Even if it won’t make certain people happy.
- Rose (Sweet Nectar, Book 1).”
― H'deel Batnij, Sweet Nectar: Book 1

“Hey, Hawthorne... You're seriously becoming a thorn in my ass.
- Thomas.”
― H'deel Batnij, Sweet Nectar: Book 1

“Sí, tú puedes salvarme… Puedes hacer aún mucho más… No me refiero a mi vida, pues temo tan poco a la muerte como al término del día. Pero puedes salvar mi honor. Sí, puedes salvar el honor de tu amigo.”
― John William Polidori

“No hay infierno peor que el de un habito del que no puedes librarte”
― Mike Ashley, Notturno: Dark Tales. La serie gotica della British Library

“The coal inside her ribs glowed hotter, daring the dark to try and snuff it out”
― Aussprey Dixon, The Quieting: A Gothic Psychological Thriller

“A girl needs to eat.”
― Johanna van Veen, Blood on Her Tongue

“I want," she whispered, her voice unnervingly low, almost
hollow. A chill snaked down my spine, the same sensation that
haunted my dreams. Dreams where shadows murmured secrets in
voices I didn't recognize, always just before I woke gasping in the
dark.
The room shifted, almost imperceptibly, as though the air itself
was holding its breath.”
― Natalie G. Bergman, Pearl Bound: Born with power. Bound by terror. Freed by truth.

“A chilling, addictive read with a powerful protagonist. — Kirkus Reviews”
― Kirkus Book Review for Pearl Bound

“Yet one had ancestors in literature, as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Complete Short Stories; The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

“Yet one had ancestors in literature, as well as in one's own race, mearer perhaps in type and temperament”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorain Gray

“...he knew so well how to use the serpents art, or such was the will of fate, that he gained her affections.”
― John William Polidori y otros, 'Vampyre'

“Names change but blood remembers.”
― C.C. Kell, Legacy of the Eye