Nightmarish Quotes & Sayings

My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments. — Amy Bloom

My ghost is the only soul who ever comes to cry on my grave ... Only the skies cried sincerely on my funeral. — Simona Panova

The pre-history of our species is hag-ridden with episodes of nightmarish ignorance and calamity, for which religion used to identify, not just the wrong explanation but the wrong culprit. Human sacrifices were made preeminently in times of epidemics, useless prayers were uttered, bogus "miracles" attested to, and scapegoats
such as Jews or witches
hunted down and burned. — Christopher Hitchens

This is my perspective and has always been my perspective on life: I have a very grim, pessimistic view of it. I always have, since I was a little boy. It hasn't gotten worse with age or anything. I do feel that it's a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience, and that the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself. — Woody Allen

resembling in his spectacles and nothing else (from the waist down the table concealed him; anyone entering the room would have taken him to be stark naked) a baroque effigy created out of colored cake dough by someone with a faintly nightmarish affinity for the perverse, — William Faulkner

Those of us who have seen violent death up close, who have seen what high-powered bullets can do to living human tissue, have a horror of inflicting that nightmarish, never forgotten damage on a fellow human being. Perhaps the only more terrifying prospect is that such a fate should befall us or our loved ones. This is why we, a representative cross-section of America's population, keep deadly weapons for personal defense. — Massad Ayoob

It'll be hard not to tease your folk sometimes."

Brishen couldn't imagine how she might go about such a thing. He had no idea if the Kai and the Gauri even knew the same jokes or found the same things funny. "What do you mean?"

He almost leapt out of his skin when Ildiko stared at him as both of her eyes drifted slowly down and over until they seemed to meet together, separated only by the elegant bridge of her nose.

"Lover of thorns and holy gods!" he yelped and clapped one hand across her eyes to shut out the sight. "Stop that," he ordered.

Ildiko laughed and pushed his hand away. She laughed even harder when she caught sight of his expression. "Wait," she gasped on a giggle. "I can do better. Want to see me make one eye cross and have the other stay still?"

Brishen reared back. "No!" He grimaced. "Nightmarish. I'll thank you to keep that particular talent to yourself, wife. — Grace Draven

In their eyes I must have appeared like some kind of nightmarish totem, a domestic idiot suffering from the irreversible brain damage of a motorway accident and now put out each morning to view the scene of his own cerebral death. — J.G. Ballard

There's no way I'm facing them on my own."
"Which one are you afraid of? Lord Sol-in-Ar?"
"Cora."
"The Veskan princess?" Kell laughed. "She's just a child."
"She was just a child - and a nightmarish one at that - but I've heard she's grown into something truly fearsome."
Kell shook his head. "Come on, then," he said, slinging his arm around the prince's shoulder. "I'll defend you."
"My hero. — Victoria Schwab

If the Cowardly Lion were on RuPaul's Drag Race, so much of my childhood would be less nightmarish. — Julie Klausner

I find the violence in PG13 movies unbearable. This kid will never run home, never have another birthday. His death is slow, nightmarish. And you have to explore the consequences - the people who live on with this death. — Marlon James

A confused society, a deeply endangered society, is a group of people all lost in nightmarish commute. The systems, institutions, and culture of such a society discourage people from feeling the trust and belonging that come with being at home in your world. A — Ethan Nichtern

Ever-busy, ever-building, ever-in-motion, ever-throwing-out the old for the new, we have hardly paused to think about what we are so busy building, and what we have thrown away. Meanwhile, the everyday landscape becomes more nightmarish and unmanageable each year. — James Howard Kunstler

May your dreams be fleeting, Gravier says to us and I smile. I don't want my dreams to be fleeting tonight. Tonight I hope I would see something, anything to put my mind at ease. I fear I would get the opposite but I still drift off in the hope if they were of the nightmarish kind, that then they would be fleeting after-all. — Celia Mcmahon

At the last parent visitation night I'd sorta accidentally watched a majorly nightmarish scene between Aphrodite and her parents. Her dad's the mayor of Tulsa. Her mom might be Satan. — P.C. Cast

The nihilist makes one mistake: he does not realise that other people are also nihilists, and that the nihilism of other people is now an active historical factor. He has no consciousness of the possibility of transcendence. The fact is, however, that the present reign of survival, in which all the talk about progress expresses nothing so much as the fear that progress may be impossible, is itself a product of history, is itself the outcome of all the renunciations of humanity that have been made over the centuries. Indeed, the history of survival is the historical movement which will eventually undo history itself. For clear awareness of just how nightmarish life has become is on the point of fusing with a consciousness of the successive renunciations of the past, and thus too with the real desire to pick up the movement of transcendence everywhere in space and time where it has been prematurely interrupted. — Raoul Vaneigem

Generally speaking: Expect nothing but nightmarish obscenities to be born when human heads come together in intercourse. — Thomas Ligotti

But if someone had slowed him down, just slightly interrupted his course, maybe he could have gotten through that one nightmarish moment; maybe he would never get that close to it again. — Frederick Barthelme

Stepping lithe and incredulous from the study; of Karras, emerging bewildered from the kitchen while the nightmarish poundings and croakings continued. Merrin went calmly up the staircase, a slender hand like alabaster sliding upward on the banister. Karras came up beside Chris, and together they watched from below as Merrin entered Regan's bedroom and closed the door behind him. For a time there was silence. Then abruptly the demon laughed hideously and Merrin swiftly exited the room, closed the door, then moved quickly down the hall while behind him the bedroom door opened again and Sharon poked her head out, staring after him with an odd expression on her face. Merrin descended the staircase rapidly and put out his hand to the waiting Karras. — William Peter Blatty

When you kissed me that night, did it mean anything to you?
How could he give her an honest answer? When he'd kissed her that night, it had meant little. But there'd been moments in the years since - dark, harrowing, nightmarish moments - when that kiss had come to mean everything. Hope. Salvation. A reason to drag one mud-caked boot in front of the other and press on, while men around him fell. He had remembered Cecily, in times and places he hadn't expected to think of her at all. In places a delicate, well-bred lady had no business intruding.

-Luke's thoughts — Tessa Dare

Even if this little account of mine, this little chronicle seems to disclose secrets that might undermine the nightmarish order of things, it does nothing but support and promulgate that order. Nothing can resist or betray this nightmare because nothing exists that might do anything, that might be anything that could realize a success in that way. The very idea of such a thing is only nonsense and dreams. — Thomas Ligotti

I lie more convincingly than I tell the truth. — Simona Panova

There are also hunger strikes. Hunger strikes are noble and sometimes necessary. If you're a political prisoner in China or North Korea (where the entire country is on a hunger strike, not by choice), I get it. For you, it's life or death. But at Harvard, it's about a press clipping and maybe getting a better grade or a higher class of hand job. So when an undergrad adopts a hunger strike in order to get someone to divest from oil, I say, let the twerp starve. Most of them are overfed, pudgy masses of soft tissue - it wouldn't hurt if these sad sacks lost a few pounds. They might even understand the plight of the average Venezuelan, who operates under conditions American activists see as utopian, when they're really nightmarish. How about the next time one of our coeds feels a hunger strike coming on, we exchange her with someone who's genuinely starving? — Greg Gutfeld

A disturbing novel about dreams and wishes, a nightmarish distaff monkey's paw of a book that it's impossible to forget. Lisa Tuttle remains our preeminent chronicler of family madness and desire. — Neil Gaiman

Marry Gentry Swallowing Darkness (Laurell K. Hamilton):Pick any fairy tale that's based on older stories, and the heroine of the piece has a miserable, dangerous, nightmarish time of it. — Laurell K. Hamilton

You are never so alone as when you are ill on stage. The most nightmarish feeling in the world is suddenly to feel like throwing up in front of four thousand people. — Judy Garland

Sometimes Geraldine feels like she can drive forever. Maybe that's partially why she took a job at Milo General Motors. Driving is the best means of escape that the human race has, at least, that's her opinion. She's never had the guts to try drugs before, both because her sister was a junkie in the last few months she knew her, and because she's heard the overdose horror stories, seen 'Requiem for a Dream', smelled the vapours of a meth lab that Julia's boyfriend built, heard the crunching glass of crack vials and heroine needles when they happen to break. Even this alone is too surreal, not to mention that if she were high or tripping on acid or whatever the drug of choice may be, this would give the ghosts more power to morph into something even more nightmarish than they already are. — Rebecca McNutt

Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal. — David Foster Wallace

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths. — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

The modern chicken is both a technological triumph and a poster child for all that is sad and nightmarish about our industrial agriculture. The most engineered creature in history is also the world's most commonly mistreated animal. — Andrew Lawler

Paranoia has its downsides as an agency in daily life, or in the political sphere of collective action, which finds itself beset everywhere by the nightmarish influence of conspiracy thinking (they call it theory, but theories exist to be tested, and conspiracy thinking exists never to be tested, and globally ignores the results of tests imposed by others). The suspicion that malign operators are responsible for every one of the injustices and heartbreaks of existence is a consoling view, a balm to bleak glimpses of the void behind our reality. It's brave to pursue truth, and brave to pursue and expose tricky and well-hidden bad guys (Nazi doctors, Pentagon intelligence-distorters, etc.). It's not brave to think tricky, well-hidden bad guys are the whole truth of what's out there. It might even be bravery's opposite. Or maybe it should go under the name religion. — Jonathan Lethem

What makes a nightmare nightmarish is the sense that something is happening that should not be. While nightmares are the most convenient reference point for this sense of the impossible, the unthinkable, as something that is actually happening, it is not restricted to our sleeping hours. — Thomas Ligotti

And I feared that death picks up where life left off. An endless barrage of unbearable obstacles. A godforsaken terrain where lost souls find even less mercy. A shattered dreamstate where every somnambulant second is plagued by the nightmarish preoccupation of one's own fears. A bleak panorama where not even death offers any release, for what you wrought will come back to haunt. As if the struggle never ends. As if there is not now, nor ever has been peace. Peace being foreign to my nature. The nature of the fucking beast. — Lydia Lunch

Pain has an odd way of expressing itself in the acts of business. No matter how many setbacks a leader might experience, there always seems to be a new opaque watermark of endurance testing, invisibly triggered for erratic combustion in each compounding decision. Every CEO in the world knows this, yet few have the good sense to walk away from the table when their cards are hot. Why win in Act Two when a comeback in Act Three gives you a longer biography? Ego is not so much about immortality as it is about demonstrating stately resistance to nightmarish attacks in public forums. Any good smack to the head is a continuity wake up call, or at least another invitation to be interviewed by Charlie Rose. — Ken Goldstein

Some stuff are kind of nightmarish... or chillish...

This are Reddit Collection #1,2,3 and soona 4! — Deyth Banger

Why not try thinking of your life as hilarious rather than nightmarish? — Julia Sweeney

If Iran and North Korea, by some horrible, devilish, nightmarish scenario, got together and went to war at the same time, one against Saudi Arabia and one against South Korea, I don't know what we would do about that. I don't know that we could stop them short of using nuclear weapons. — Ben Stein

'The Big Sleep' would have been a more effective study of nightmarish existence had the detective been more complicated and had more curiosity been shown about his sweetheart's relation to the crime. — Manny Farber

Later, when they sat down and went over the figures closely, they found an interesting pattern. Adamowski had received fifty-one percent of the votes, cast by white persons. But the enormous black vote had given Daley his victory. The people who were trapped in the ghetto slums and the nightmarish public housing projects, the people who had the worst school system and were most often degraded by the Police Department, the people who received the fewest campaign promises and who were ignored as part of the campaign trail, had given him his third term. They had done it quietly, asking for nothing in return. Exactly what they got. — Mike Royko

I really can't be bothered going to a barber. And shaving every morning, that's nightmarish. I spent my teenage years covered in tiny little bits of toilet paper. — Alan Moore

No mother's nightmarish valley is so dark that Jesus cannot bear her burdens the whole way through. — Gloria Furman

It's funny how insomnia has a way of hauling faded memories up from the cellar of the mind, unearthing buried bits of nostalgia from deep within and spreading the broken, jagged pieces out in front of you like a display of junk at a garage sale. It makes you feel cheap and guilty when you didn't do a thing in the world to kindle the dull burn in your veins or the sting in your eyes. Some nights the painful past unexpectedly pushes up through the floorboards like an ugly nightmarish weed, and by doing so, cultivates and nurtures an entirely new species of headache. — Adam Young

Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world. — Werner Herzog

A crime scene is a crime scene is a crime scene. Except for the unique nightmarish qualities of each one. I was standing in a bedroom of a very nice one-story ranch. There was a white ceiling fan that turned slowly. It made a faint whirring creak, as if it wasn't screwed in tight on one side. Better to concentrate on the small things. The way the east light fell through the slanting blinds, painting the room in zebra-stripe shadows. Better not to look at what was left on the bed. Didn't want to look. Didn't want to see. Had to see. Had to look. Might find a clue. Sure, and pigs could fucking fly. But still, maybe, maybe there would be a clue. Maybe. Hope is a lying bitch. There — Laurell K. Hamilton

Aden St. George managed to avoid having to kill the guard stationed outside his quarry's crypt-like cell, although the thug outside the caves hadn't been so lucky. Still, that bastard had tried to knife him in the gut so Aden could hardly be faulted for returning the favor. And knowing what he did about the men who'd kidnapped Lady Vivien Shaw, he wouldn't waste his fitful conscience on that brutal but necessary act. Killing was not a favorite pastime, but only rarely did it disturb his sleep.
Tonight's rescue mission carried no inconvenient opportunities for remorse since a woman's life and innocence hung in the balance. True, the gossips whispered that Lady Vivien's innocence was an open question, but what would happen to her if Aden failed wasn't. Without his intervention she would disappear into a nightmarish life, forever beyond the protection of her family and friends. — Vanessa Kelly

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart. — Iris Murdoch

Actually,the nightmarish thought occurred to me that with electronic delivery of books becoming a norm, soon writers may be expected to provide several versions of their book, ranging from the Easy to the Complex, and buyers will choose what they're in the mood for with the click of a button! I do hope not; — Emma Donoghue

But suspense presupposes uncertainty. No matter how nightmarish the situation, real suspense is impossible when we know in advance that the protagonist will prevail (as we would if Woolrich had used series characters) or will be destroyed. This is why, despite his congenital pessimism, Woolrich manages any number of times to squeeze out an upbeat resolution. Precisely because we can never know whether a particular novel or story will be light or dark, allegre or noir, his work remains hauntingly suspenseful.
("Introduction") — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

Facing the darkness, admitting the pain, allowing the pain to be pain, is never easy. This is why courage - big-heartedness - is the most essential virtue on the spiritual journey. But if we fail to let pain be pain - and our entire patriarchal culture refuses to let this happen - then pain will haunt us in nightmarish ways. We will become pain's victims instead of the healers we might become. — Matthew Fox

The wind blew through the window. The trousers swayed. Doubtless when they were on Mr. Craggs, the trousers looked splendid and went perfectly well together with his body. But like this, isolated in space, Mr. Cragg's trousers were nightmarish.
The wind blew through the window. As they swayed, the trousers were alive. A shot, truncated, square creature consisting entirely of legs, belly and what went with them. And now it would get down and start walking among people and over people and grow and ... — Yevgeny Zamyatin

It is not quite as dark here as we thought. On the contrary, the interior is pulsating with light. It is, of course, the internal light of roots, a wandering phosphorescence, tiny veins of a light marbling the darkness, an evanescent shimmer of nightmarish substances. Likewise, when we sleep, severed from the world, straying into deep introversion, on a return journey into ourselves, we can see clearly through our closed eyelids, because thoughts are kindled in us by internal tapers and smolder erratically. This is how total regressions occur, retreats into self, journeys to the roots. This is how we branch out into anamnesis and are shaken by underground subcutaneous shivers. For it is only above ground, in the light of day, that we are a trembling, articulate bundle of tunes; in the depth we disintegrate again into black murmurs, confused purring, a multitude of unfinished stories. — Bruno Schulz

Is not this home, this biosphere where cunning and violence is rewarded, resources are frighteningly scarce and security never guaranteed, a nightmarish cage where every inmate is contracted by birth to prey upon the other in order to steal the proteins and fats and sugars and minerals they need just to stay alive one more day in what amounts to a daily apocalypse of obliged bloodletting? — John Zande

To live thoughtfully with Christlike love we must allow ourselves to be disturbed by the grotesque realities surrounding us and sympathetically enter into the nightmarish suffering of others. — Gregory A. Boyd

Sam was staring at Claire with about the same amazement as his brother had shown. Claire didn't seem to realize it, or else she was too preoccupied to think of it, but she was the second thunderbolt that had fallen on this long-hidebound household in as many days. First one of the hated race of doctors had been shoehorned in on them as the only thing that might get them out of an already nightmarish situation, and now this matter-of-fact slip of a girl had pushed into it of her own accord. They must have felt like the world was coming down around their ears. — Elisabeth Grace Foley