Psychological Horror Quotes

“The mirror looked at me, and hated what it saw.”
― Michael F Simpson, Hypnagogia

“Glass always drew my eyes, or my mind. That reflection — the mirror, and the Other Body inside it. I wanted to turn off my mind but it was impossible. So many terrible, monstrous things buzzed around inside of it like electric knife blades, cutting, cutting, cutting.”
― Michael F Simpson, Hypnagogia

“I looked around again, quickly left, quickly right. There was someone around me. Something. In the shop windows, faint and ghostly faces gazing out. Directly at me no matter which side of the empty space I looked upon. Once again the darkness and the impossible distance obstructed my ability to discern any detailed features, leaving me alone with only vague ideas of the inhuman human form.”
― Michael F Simpson, Hypnagogia

“I screamed last night, and felt the sharp, reflective elements boring into my skull. I felt such deep, intense devotions, the kind of emotions it is only possible to experience in nightmares. But I was not dreaming, I could not sleep. I was wide awake. In pain. Debating with my own reflection which one of us should own our veins.”
― Michael F Simpson, Hypnagogia

“The pane of glass separating me from my family. I didn’t think they could understand, even now. It wasn’t possible. I said one thing and it became something else. They said one thing and maybe that became something else too. Refractions of voice bouncing from torment to torment. I wasn’t right for this world.”
― Michael F Simpson, Hypnagogia

“This could have gone on for years. Me having my brain torn apart by sensations, thoughts and feelings of somatic torment at the hands of an Other Body in its mirror. Family and friends wanting to help — I assumed that was so, at least — but failing in the specifics. This glass between us making the seen, unseen, the seeing, unseeing. Making the outspoken voiceless and the listening deaf. Making the caring confused and the cared for distraught. Like an exile trapped in a labyrinth of glass panes splitting me off from my society and my tribe, no matter which direction I turned, no matter which impossible hallway I travelled down I was always separated from reflections of some other world where people could be happy, and safe, and understand their own inner workings well enough to voice them in the form of words.”
― Michael F Simpson, Hypnagogia

“And the wind is not wind, it is the breath of refracted light, chilling me with its memories.”
― Michael F Simpson, Hypnagogia

“I want to see, I want to see, I want to see you dying.”
― Michael F Simpson, Hypnagogia

“Of course, if you broke a glass orb, and put it back together in the wrong order, you wouldn’t have an orb anymore. That’s how his fragmentation worked. My dreams became illogical but they also made perfect sense for as long as he kept me in his realm. If that which is narratively flawed makes perfect sense, he has control. He could twist the fragments into Heaven or Hell and either would work.”
― Michael F Simpson, Sempiternal

“How have you been sleeping? I would like to assume poorly. That makes my job easier. See, you did not know it before, but every time you sleep I am watching you. And those horrible dreams you tried so hard to forget about, yet could not get out of your head? You are welcome.”
― Michael F Simpson, Sempiternal

“He flicked a switch, and the voltage screamed as it ran through my soul.”
― Michael F Simpson, Sempiternal

“Because all of our thoughts are just encrypted messages carried through electrical pathways by weird, deformed insects in our brains. It’s only when you start to hear them drilling caverns in your skull that you realise how crazy this is, and you learn what true insanity is — pure, human conscience.”
― Michael F Simpson, Sempiternal

“The thing from inside my soul started to sing.

It sounded like suicide.”
― Michael F Simpson, Sempiternal

“It’s that I am the prison. I’m the cell, the bars, the locked door, and the scream no one hears.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“Ouija Board Web by Stewart Stafford

Someone's been in my room,
Helped themselves to my beer.
Bottled my portal to escape,
And left behind a sober fear.

I guess I'll climb the silence,
To the mirror, if I'm still here,
Tap out a drowning rhythm,
To send an S.O.S. so clear.

A phantom knocking from within,
Coins rub my spirit board away,
Voices say breathe out and in,
Darkest night blurs into day.

Moth to the flame in a spider web,
Mummified to twist in the draught,
Here comes the eight-eyed sentinel,
To finish its ice-cold Arachnid craft.

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

“Hellish grief and isolation catch you in a prism where you live and die at the same time and in the same space. Hellish grief and isolation catch you so tightly they leave you haunted and tangled like a knot.”
― B.B. Clifford, Tangled Knot: The Tale of Eris of Suburbia

“They wear hoods so I can’t see their faces, but they still terrify me with their slow, deliberate movements. Usually they just stand before me, swaying in unison, but something has made them restless.”
― BB Clifford, Rainbow Warrior: The Tale of Ares, The Battle-Lustful Son

“They say the fortress site is rotten, evil even, and it should be avoided. Just look at how unsightly it is, how wildly the tufts of grass have grown as the ivy wraps around the broken window frames and bricks. Even the trees stoop with a bending back. When it looks bad, they say, it is bad, and that badness could be contagious, so keep away. Unruly and dangerous, like an uprising that needs to be quashed.”
― BB Clifford, Rainbow Warrior: The Tale of Ares, The Battle-Lustful Son

“Maybe that’s what this place is. A place for the scapegoats, the truth-tellers, and the ones who don’t play the game. They always end up in the jails and the hospitals and camps like this. And if you tell too many truths about the people who are keeping you against your will, they’ll manacle you to a bed frame, forcibly medicate you, electro-shock, and even lobotomize you.”
― BB Clifford

“The ones who scream for the baby are men, of course, because they wear suits, and suits show that they have power, power to decide what girls should do and not do, how they should behave, and what they should do about a life that grows inside them. They create the rules even though they would never suffer a similar fate; they would never have to watch something growing each day as they wait for it to tear its way from their body.”
― BB Clifford

“His father would say that if you build facing east, the sunlight will move toward a man at dawn, as if bearing some glorious gift. But in truth, it had been a long while since he had seen any day as such.”
― K.P Francis, If Darkness Sleeps

“I exist inside a living hell — not a nightmare, but an unrelenting, screaming abyss with no exit. I am cursed beyond redemption, haunted by horrors that claw at my soul, and possessed by something monstrous that wears my face and mocks my every scream. Every second is torture — not pain, but a divine punishment etched into my bones, burning through my nerves, flooding my skull with fire. I am not alive. I am a condemned vessel, dragged through a waking exorcism that never ends.”
― Jonathan Harnisch

“I am possessed—not by devils from hell, but by nerves that scream louder than sin. Every breath is a betrayal. To fake calm in a corpse that still moves is the cruelest joke. The devil wears my skin now. And he lies.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“It’s not that I’m suffering inside a prison. It’s that I am the prison. I’m the cell, the bars, the locked door, and the scream no one hears.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“Dyran rose slowly, a vermilion scarf in his hand. Every eye in the area was now on him; as host to the conflict, it was his privilege to signal the start of the duel. He smiled graciously, and dropped the square of silk. It fluttered to the sand, ignored, as the carnage began. In the end, even a few of the elven spectators excused themselves, and Serina found herself averting her eyes. She’d had no idea how much damage two blunt instruments could do. But Dyran watched on; not eagerly, as Lady Alinor, who sat forward in her seat, punctuating each blow with little coos of delight—nor with bored patience, as Sandar. But with casual amusement, a little, pleased smile playing at the corners of his mouth, and a light in his eyes when he looked at Alinor that Serina could not read. And when it was over—as it was, quickly, too quickly for many of the spectators—when all of the other elven lords had gone, he made his move. Toward Alinor. A significant touch of his hand on her arm, a few carefully chosen words—both, as if Serina were not present.”
― Mercedes Lackey, The Elvenbane

“The Hollow 13 Series By Silvia Moan coming soon!”
― Silvia Moan

“The asylum, he was beginning to suspect, wasn't just a repository for the broken-minded. It was a tomb, and he, John, the stoic, cynical nurse, was merely one of its unwitting caretakers, complicit in the very secrets he now felt compelled to uncover.”
― Andreo Romera, The Old Asylum: A Haunting Gothic Psychological Thriller

“The Basement Morgue by Stewart Stafford

A reluctant errand to a basement morgue,
No mortal knew what things lurked there,
The elevator shuddered to a halt, opening,
To a scattered boneyard of patient beds.

Totem tchotchkes of a broken system,
Dead corridors stretched left and right,
A charged cold-sweat silence hung,
As a flaccid desk stethoscope rattled.

Buried my nose in my clipboard;
Had to find their machine - now!
A gurney wheeled itself past me,
Disappearing into an anteroom.

A hanging skeleton lunged at me—
Spindly fingers choked me into blackness.
Rousing to bright lights, blinding me;
Icy steel drawers swallowed my screams.

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

“Once you’ve checked in, you’re already part of it. Welcome to South of the Border. Stay as long as you like. Forever.”
― Thomas Miller

“Thank you Scarlet, how I wish those words weren’t burned in my brain with Lily’s innocent voice. She had nothing to thank me for. I was the one who was grateful to feel again.”
― Ashley Grant, No Longer Lolita