Algernon Blackwood Quotes & Sayings

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival ... a survival of a hugely remote period when ... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes in forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity ... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds ... — Algernon Blackwood

So convinced was he that the external world was the result of a vast deception practised upon him by the gross senses, that when he stared at a great building like St. Paul's he felt it would not very much surprise him to see it suddenly quiver like a shape of jelly and then melt utterly away, while in its place stood all at once revealed the mass of colour, or the great intricate vibrations, or the splendid sound - the spiritual idea - which it represented in stone. — Algernon Blackwood

My unworldliness, even at 21, was abnormal. Not only had I never smoked tobacco nor touched alcohol of any description, but I had never yet set foot inside a theatre, or gone to a race course I had never seen, nor held a billiard cue, nor touched a card. — Algernon Blackwood

The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make use of it! — Algernon Blackwood

Ritual is the passage way of the soul into the Infinite. — Algernon Blackwood

My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world. — Algernon Blackwood

The Wendigo is simply the Call of the Wild personified, which some natures hear to their own destruction. — Algernon Blackwood

The whole dead weight of my growing fear fell upon me and shook me. Then I burst out laughing too. It was the only thing to do: and the sound of my laughter also made me understand his. The strain of physical pressure caused it
this explosion of unnatural laughter in both of us; it was an effort of repressed forces to seek relief; it was a temporary safety-valve. — Algernon Blackwood

They talked trees from morning till night. It stirred in her the old subconscious trail of dread, a trail that led ever into the darkness of big woods; and such feelings, as her early evangelical training taught her, were temptings. To regard them in any other way was to play with danger. — Algernon Blackwood

He gave it the benefit of the doubt; he was Scotch.
("The Wendigo") — Algernon Blackwood

No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least
inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the
walls of memory. — Algernon Blackwood

Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind. — Algernon Blackwood

I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed — Algernon Blackwood

Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible.
("The Wendigo") — Algernon Blackwood

The Desert settled back to sleep, — Algernon Blackwood

A strong emotion, especially if experienced for the first time, leaves a vivid memory of the scene where it occurred. — Algernon Blackwood

I used to tell strange, wild, improbable tales akin to ghost stories, and discovered a taste for spinning yarns. — Algernon Blackwood

What is Reality, in the last resort," he asked, "but the thing a man's vision brings to him--to believe? There's no other criterion. The criticism of opposite types of mind is merely a confession of their own limitations." Being — Algernon Blackwood

because what one thinks finds expression in words, and what one says, happens. — Algernon Blackwood

To the Sabbath! To the Sabbath!' they cried. 'On to the Witches' Sabbath!
Up and down that narrow hall they danced, the women on each side of him, to the wildest measure he had ever imagined, yet which he dimly, dreadfully remembered, till the lamp on the wall flickered and went out, and they were left in total darkness. And the devil woke in his heart with a thousand vile suggestions and made him afraid. — Algernon Blackwood

He was a man in whom the dreams of God that haunt the soul in youth, though overlaid by the scum that gathers in the fight for money, had not, as with the majority, utterly died the death.
- Secret Worship — Algernon Blackwood

And, with the dark, the Forest came up boldly and pressed against the very walls and windows, peering in upon them, joining hands above the slates and chimneys. — Algernon Blackwood

Not easily may an individual escape the deep slavery of the herd. — Algernon Blackwood

For beauty was her accident, and while admirable, was not a determining factor. — Algernon Blackwood

Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to exalt. — Algernon Blackwood

For this was unpermissible, foolish, dangerous, and he meant to stop it in the bud. What — Algernon Blackwood

It is, of course, extremely interesting to look back across the years questioningly, wonderingly, objectively, without detachments, though seeing "objectively" does not necessarily imply seeing truthfully. — Algernon Blackwood

The loneliness of the place had entered our very bones, and silence seemed natural, for after a bit the sound of our voices became a trifle unreal and forced; whispering would have been the fitting mode of communication, I felt, and the human voice, always rather absurd amid the roar of the elements, now carried with it something almost illegitimate. It was like talking out loud in church, or in some place where it was not lawful, perhaps not quite safe, to be overheard. — Algernon Blackwood

Beliefs are deeper than discoveries. They are eternal." Stahl — Algernon Blackwood

The psychology of places, for some imaginations at least, is very vivid; for the wanderer, especially, camps have their "note" either of welcome or rejection. — Algernon Blackwood

across the pale glimmering of sand, — Algernon Blackwood

The impulse came to her clairvoyantly, and she obeyed without a sign of hesitation. Deeper comprehension would come to her of the whole awful puzzle. And come it did, yet not in the way she imagined and expected. — Algernon Blackwood

The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings. — Algernon Blackwood

Death, according to one's belief, means either annihilation or release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves no change of character. You don't suddenly alter just because the body's gone. — Algernon Blackwood

It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally witnessed.
("The Wendigo") — Algernon Blackwood

I wish I were not quite so lonely - and so poor. And yet I love both my loneliness and my poverty. The former makes me appreciate the companionship of the wind and rain, while the latter preserves my liver and prevents me wasting time in dancing attendance upon women. — Algernon Blackwood

Like a forest rose the huge peaks above the slumbering village, measuring the night and heavens. They beckoned him. And something born of the snowy desolation, born of the midnight and silent grandeur, born of the great listening hollows of the night, something that lay 'twixt terror and wonder, dropped from the vast wintry spaces down into his heart
and called him. Very softly, unrecorded in any word or thought his brain could compass, it laid its spell upon him. Fingers of snow brushed the surface of his heart. The power and quiet majesty of the winter's night appalled him ...
-The Glamour of the Snow — Algernon Blackwood

It is the little things that pierce and burn and prick for years to come. — Algernon Blackwood

Overhead, between the tips of the highest firs, he saw the first stars peeping, and the sky was a clean, pale amethyst that seemed exactly the colour all these memories clothed themselves with in his mind.
- Secret Worship — Algernon Blackwood

his thoughts dwelt upon the past rather than upon the future; that he read much history, and felt specially drawn to certain periods whose spirit he understood instinctively as though he had lived in them; — Algernon Blackwood

Time is measured by the quality and not the quanity of sensations it contains. — Algernon Blackwood

In spite of his exceeding mental perturbation, Simpson struggled hard to detect its nature, and define it, but the ascertaining of an elusive scent, not recognized subconsciously and at once, is a very subtle operation of the mind. And he failed. It was gone before he could properly seize or name it. Approximate description, even, seems to have been difficult, for it was unlike any smell he knew. Acrid rather, not unlike the odor of a lion, he thinks, yet softer and not wholly unpleasing, with something almost sweet in it that reminded him of the scent of decaying garden leaves, earth, and the myriad, nameless perfumes that make up the odor of a big forest. Yet the 'odor of lions' is the phrase with which he usually sums it all up.
("The Wendigo") — Algernon Blackwood

Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire! — Algernon Blackwood

She had dreamed that she lay beneath a spreading tree somewhere, a tree that whispered with ten thousand soft lips of green; and the dream continued for a moment even after waking. — Algernon Blackwood

No man can describe to another convincingly wherein lies the magic of the woman who ensnares him. — Algernon Blackwood

Invention has ever imagination and poetry at its heart. — Algernon Blackwood

For he felt about the whole affair the touch somewhere of a great Outer Horror - and his scattered powers had not as yet had time to collect themselves into a definite attitude of fighting self-control. — Algernon Blackwood

The best match in the world will not light a candle unless the wick be first suitably prepared. — Algernon Blackwood

Deep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in the jaws of the wilderness. The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass beneath the stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odors of coming winter.
("The Wendigo") — Algernon Blackwood

The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the only sounds audible. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast world of branches nothing stirred. Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees. — Algernon Blackwood

And each, believing he was utterly and finally right, damned with equally positive conviction the rest of the world. — Algernon Blackwood

The Forest bellowed out its victory to the winds; the winds in turn proclaimed it to the Night. — Algernon Blackwood

The Wise are silent, the Foolish speak, and children are thus led astray. — Algernon Blackwood

It was clear, however, that the woman had in herself some secret source of joy, that she was now an aggressive, positive force, sure of herself, and apparently afraid of nothing in heaven or hell. — Algernon Blackwood

Mrs. Bittarcy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.
("The Man Whom The Trees Loved") — Algernon Blackwood

Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order. Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically, betraying a scale of life monstrous and immature. He envisaged it rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men: when the forces of nature were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn. To this day he thinks of what he termed years later in a sermon 'savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity as it exists.'
("The Wendigo") — Algernon Blackwood

When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us. — Algernon Blackwood

For Felix Henriot, with his admixture of foreign blood, was philosopher as well as vagabond, a strong poetic and religious strain sometimes breaking out through fissures in his complex nature. He had seen much life; had read many books. The passionate desire of youth to solve the world's big riddles had given place to a resignation filled to the brim with wonder. Anything might be true. Nothing surprised him. The most outlandish beliefs, for all he knew, might fringe truth somewhere. He had escaped that cheap cynicism with which disappointed men soothe their vanity when they realise that an intelligible explanation of the universe lies beyond their powers. He no longer expected final answers. — Algernon Blackwood

Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their immediate neighbourhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased. — Algernon Blackwood

You know," he went on almost under his breath, "every man who thinks for himself and feels vividly finds he lives in a world of his own, apart, and believes that one day he'll come across, either in a book or in a person, the Priest who shall make it clear to him. — Algernon Blackwood

And soon after he slept, the change of wind he had divined stirred gently the reflection of the stars within the lake. — Algernon Blackwood