James

“Until this moment I had considered myself the most miserable creature in the world. Now I realised that in the rubble of those villages and ponderous brick houses built on the mountain, people had lived whose bones were now putrefied, and bits and pieces of their bodies endured in purple water lilies. Among these people, maybe there existed one cursed painter, one blighted painter, a pathetic maker of pen cases, just like me.”
― Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl

“No Human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They would become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter. Into Pure Energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust.”
― Arthur Clarke

“If tomorrow I found that sea lions suddenly possessed free will, intellect, knew when not to sin, knew what life was and tempered justice with mercy and life with love, then I would build an undersea cathedral. And if the sparrows should, miraculously, with God’s will, gain everlasting souls tomorrow, I would freight a church with helium and take after them, for all souls, in any shape, if they have free will and are aware of their sins, will burn in hell unless given their rightful communions. I would not let a Martian sphere burn in hell, either, for it is a sphere only in mine eyes. When I close my eyes it stands before me, an intelligence, a love, a soul—and I must not deny it.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Fire Balloons [November 2002/2033]