Poe Horror Quotes & Sayings

When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe. — Donald Hall

Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. — Edgar Allan Poe

He clasped his hands to his ears as if he would tear his very brain out!" A sample line from Shadow my psychological/horror compared to Poe! — C.S. Dixon

A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no words written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished because undisturbed: and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided. — Edgar Allan Poe

It illuminated a vision Dante could not have imagined in his wildest nightmares, nor Poe in the grasp of an uncontrollable delirium. — Alan Dean Foster

Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear. — Edgar Allan Poe

And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him. — Richard Wright

What do you think of Poe?"
"He's awful. He was obviously ... what's the term ... 'disappointed in love' at some point. He probably never smiled again. The pages are just bursting with his longing for women to suffer. If he ever met me he'd probably punch me on the nose."
"I think Poe's quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone standing next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say 'Oh you know, I'm just afraid of death' and then they keep on with the screaming. — Helen Oyeyemi

Let's say it once and for all: Poe and Lovecraft - not to mention a Bruno Schulz or a Franz Kafka - were what the world at large would consider extremely disturbed individuals. And most people who are that disturbed are not able to create works of fiction. These and other names I could mention are people who are just on the cusp of total psychological derangement. Sometimes they cross over and fall into the province of 'outsider artists.' That's where the future development of horror fiction lies - in the next person who is almost too emotionally and psychologically damaged to live in the world but not too damaged to produce fiction. — Thomas Ligotti

All around were horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering desert of ebony. — Edgar Allan Poe

At three in the morning the gaudy paint is off that old whore, the world, and she has no nose and a glass eye. Gaiety becomes hollow and brittle, as in Poe's castle surrounded by the Red Death. Horror is destroyed by boredom. Love is a dream. — Stephen King

This apartment, which you no doubt profanely suppose to be the shop of Will Wimble the undertaker --a man whom we know not, and whose plebeian appellation has never before this night thwarted our royal ears --this apartment, I say, is the Dais-Chamber of our Palace, devoted to the councils of our kingdom, and to other sacred and lofty purposes. — Edgar Allan Poe

The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind. — Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is considered the great writer of horror stories, perhaps the greatest - I will say the greatest — William Friedkin

When reason returned with the morning - when I had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch - I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. — Edgar Allan Poe

His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the 'thirties and 'forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast. — H.P. Lovecraft

I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock. — Edgar Allan Poe

To be thoroughly conversant with Man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair — Edgar Allan Poe

I am SHADOW, and my dwelling is near to the
Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion
which border upon the foul Charonian canal. And then did we, the
seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and
shuddering, and aghast, for the tones in the voice of the shadow were
not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and,
varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable fell duskly upon
our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand
departed friends. — Edgar Allan Poe

People talk and rumors follow," I said.
"Most people claim that only a person possessed of the devil could write such horror."
"And what do you think?"
"You are an angel to me, Eddy, but never bet the devil your head."
"That would make a great title for a story," I observed. — Andrew Barger

I would like to see the technology used to explore more period horror genre works, for example, E. A. Poe. — Robert Englund

That motley drama - oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot. — Edgar Allan Poe

I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity. — Edgar Allan Poe

To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. — Edgar Allan Poe

Sing a song of suspense in which the players die.
Four and twenty ravens in an Edgar Allan Pie.
When the pie was broken, the ravens couldn't sing.
Their throats had been sliced open by Stephen, the new King.
The King was in his writing house, stifling a laugh
While his queen was in a tizzy of her bloody Lovecraft.
When the dead maid got the garden for her rank as royal whore,
King's shovel made it double and he married nevermore. — Jessica McHugh

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality. — Edgar Allan Poe