Step into the chilling world of horror with our carefully curated collection of the top 87 spooky quotes. Whether you’re a fan of classic tales or modern fright, these quotes capture the eerie atmosphere and spine-tingling moments that make horror so captivating. Prepare to be inspired, unsettled, and intrigued as you explore some of the most memorable lines from the darkest corners of storytelling.
1. “I think that true horror is accomplished by slowly getting into your brain. The old way is much more scary.” - Sergio Aragones
2. “The room was plainly but adequately furnished; she noted the shower stall in the bathroom beyond. Actually, she would have preferred a tub, but this would do. ” - Robert Bloch
3. “Even the most impassioned devotee of the ghost story would admit that the taste for it is slightly abnormal, a survival, perhaps, from adolescence, a disease of deficiency suffered by those whose lives and imaginations do not react satisfactorily to normal experience and require an extra thrill” - L.P. Hartley
4. “He supposed that even in Hell, people got an occasional sip of water, if only so they could appreciate the full horror of unrequited thirst when it set in again.” - Stephen King
5. “There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.” - Arthur Machen
6. “The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.” - Charles Baudelaire
7. “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
8. “You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.” - Jean Lorrain
9. “There are dread secrets that none may know and have peace. More, secrets that render whosoever knoweth them an alien unto the tribe he belongs to, that cause him to walk alone on earth, for he who takes, pays.” - E. Hoffman Price
10. “Stare at him," said Ghost. "They won't bite you if you keep staring at them."Steve backed away. "They bite?"Not really. They hiss at you, mostly. The only time geese are ever dangerous is when you happen to be standing on the edge of a cliff. I heard about a guy that almost got killed that way."By geese?"Yeah, there was a whole flock of them coming after him. All hissing and cackling and stabbing at his ankles with their big ol' beaks. He didn't know you had to stare them right in the eye, and he panicked. They backed him right over a fifty-foot cliff."So how come he didn't die?"This guy had wings," said Ghost. "He flew away.” - Poppy Z. Brite
11. “Something like panic struck at Hurlow. Moffat's calm confession of fear withdrew the prop upon which he had leaned. Down there, among the motionless shadows, lurked invisible things, things that were nameless, shapeless and malignant; things which could see without being seen. One of the long lost terrors of childhood returned to him, and like a child he put his hand into Moffat's.” - A.M. Burrage
12. “From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.” - H.P. Lovecraft
13. “Within its gates I heard the soundOf winds in cypress caverns caughtOf huddling tress that moaned, and soughtTo whisper what their roots had found.(“A Dream of Fear”)” - George Sterling
14. “I sleep with the lights on now. Not because I’m afraid of the dark, but because I like to keep the night as far away as I can.” - Keith Kekic
15. “Ever since I arrived to a state of manhood, I have felt a sincere passion for liberty. The history of nations doomed to perpetual slavery, in consequence of yielding up to tyrants their natural born liberties, I read with a sort of philosophical horror; so that the first systematical and bloody attempt at Lexington, to enslave America, thoroughly electrified my mind, and fully determined me to take part with my country.” - Ethan Allen
16. “I have seen an evil thing this night,' he said; 'I have seen how the dead drink the blood of the living. And the blood is the life.” - Francis Marion Crawford
17. “While his brain lay slowly dying, Bevan felt his body come back to life.” - Stephanie Bedwell-Grime
18. “One man carries salvation and damnation from the desert.” - Matthew Sawyer
19. “There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.” - H.P. Lovecraft
20. “In one picture, the pool was half hidden by a fringe of mace- weeds, and the dead willow was leaning across it at a prone, despondent angle, as if mysteriously arrested in its fall towards the stagnant waters. Beyond, the alders seemed to strain away from the pool, exposing their knotted roots as if in eternal effort. In the other drawing, the pool formed the main portion of the foreground, with the skeleton tree looming drearily at one side. At the water's farther end, the cat-tails seemed to wave and whisper among themselves in a dying wind; and the steeply barring slope of pine at the meadow's terminus was indicated as a wall of gloomy green that closed in the picture, leaving only a pale of autumnal sky at the top. ("Genius Loci")” - Clark Ashton Smith
21. “They walked through the rainy dark like gaunt ghosts, and Garraty didn't like to look at them. They were the walking dead.” - Stephen King
22. “It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understand their true import.” - Bram Stoker
23. “Though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley” - Alex Garland
24. “The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.” - H.P. Lovecraft
25. “Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it has often accompanied or predicted change, and served to shake up rational Complacency, challenging reason and reminding man of his darker nature. Its popularity has had its ups and downs, and it has always been the preserve of a small literary minority. As a natural challenger of classical values, it is rarely part of a culture's literary mainstream, expressing the spirit of the age; but it is an important dissenting voice, a reminder of the vast mysteries of existence, sometimes truly metaphysical in scope, but more often merely riddling.” - Franz Rottensteiner
26. “Do not be so ridiculous, I can more easily find you someone else.” Gripping the bars of his prison so strongly that the bones of his knuckles showed prominently through his pale skin, the monster growled again, “I will have no other.” Nearing the end of his patience, Klaus demanded, “Why? Why are you being so impossible?” Turning to the diminutive creature beneath the blanket, he smiled nastily, his light red eyes gleaming, “Because he wants her.” - Gwenn Wright
27. “This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and — like it or not — peculiar set of experiences to appreciate. Amazing thing to say, the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.” - Thomas Ligotti
28. “Just tell yourself they're only stories. Pamela K. Kinney (Spectre Nightmares and Visitations)” - Pamela K. Kinney
29. “Kill you all!" The clown was laughing and screaming. "Try to stop me and I'll kill you all! Drive you crazy and then kill you all! You can't stop me!” - Stephen King
30. “You can get used to horror, he thought. When it has lost immediacy and is no longer pungent and has become a steady diet. When it has degraded to a chain of mind-numbing events. (“Lover When You're Near Me”)” - Richard Matheson
31. “I'm Allen Walker!"My life....is over...I'm going to die....” - Katsura Hoshino
32. “I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.” - Shirley Jackson
33. “Nil Sine Magno Labore ("Nothing without great effort") --Motto of Brooklyn College” - Tony-Paul de Vissage
34. “Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33)” - Tim Willocks
35. “Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, "Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?" And she had tittered nervously and replied, "When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when you slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things." And he had said, "I don't mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books." And she hadn't known what to say. ("Smoke Ghost")” - Fritz Leiber
36. “It's a rotten world, Miss Millick,' said Mr. Wran, talking at the window. 'Fit for another morbid growth of superstition. It's time the ghosts, or whatever you call them, took over and began a rule of fear, They'd be no worse than men.' ("Smoke Ghost")” - Fritz Leiber
37. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” - Stanley Kubrick
38. “In a way, Darius brings the vampire back to a more classical interpretation. A modern day Dracula who is charming, sensual, and completely monstrous. There is no pretense of humanity with him. He considers himself a member of a species that is the true apex predator of the world, feeding on humans and using them as puppets for their own bizarre games. He's not struggling with any inner angst. Most humans are either food, entertainment, or useful tools to him. Sometimes all three. He finds the modern popular interpretation of vampires both amusing and useful for his own agenda.” - Julie Ann Dawson
39. “Kaufman almost smiled at the perfection of its horror. He felt an offer of insanity tickling the base of his skull, tempting him into oblivion, promising a blank indifference to the world.” - Clive Barker
40. “I could hear the chaotic laughter trailing behind me. It turned the ageless trees into a menace. They loomed around me, while hiding him. The branches tore at my skin in an effort to bind me, while weeds sought to shackle my ankles, so that I could go no further. The pain they caused was minor, when I compared it to the searing inferno at my core.” - J.D. Stroube
41. “It wasn’t that she necessarily wanted to “socialize” at the bonfire, but she wanted to broadcast to the general population that her antisocial behavior was a personal choice not a sentence to social leprosy.” - J.D. Stroube
42. “My power grew angry that it was confined to my petite frame and pulled against my taut skin. Growing bolder, it tore through my skin to lay flat against my outer edge. The glowing energy began to solidify against my flesh; it lengthened to mold itself to my frame and contained me in a transparent cocoon. I flexed my fingers against the waxy surface and began to panic. I was cut off from my coven now and could not feel their thoughts. I could see the panic on their faces as I fell onto my side to convulse.” - J.D. Stroube
43. “Jesus Christ-" "Is Not here right now," the man in black replied,"and even if he were, he could not save you.” - Brian Keene
44. “The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.” - Aberjhani
45. “Rockwood didn't have a movie theater or an IHOP or a strip mall. But it did have two churches, a ramshackle bar, and last (but certainly not least) Wacky Willie's Deluxe Goofy Golf, a barren landscape of wilted ferns and plastic flamingos with peeling paint. Wacky Willie had added the 'Deluxe' when finally ridding the thirteenth hole windmill of a stubborn family of bats after a great and terrible struggle that would forever be known as 'The Fearsome Bat War of Rockwood County' by Willie, but was usually referred to as 'That Time Willie Had to Get Rabies Shots' by everyone else.” - A. Lee Martinez
46. “Crazy got nothin on us" Neesa” - C.T. Todd
47. “You will die like a dog for no good reason.” - Ernest Hemingway
48. “But sometimes, in tight corners, when your back is against the wall and the world is against you, you have to fight back in unexpected ways.” - Caroline B. Cooney
49. “I’m the sexiest of them all! - Carol” - Matthew Harvel Leeth
50. “Fantômas! The sound of that name evoked the worst horrors! Fantômas! This terrorist, this über-criminal who has never shrunk from any cruelty, any horror - Fantômas is evil personified! Fantômas! He stops at nothing!” - Marcel Allain
51. “Lo tocó como nunca antes se había atrevido a hacerlo, acariciando su cuerpo con la punta de los dedos muy, muy suavemente, recorriendo la piel levantada como una mujer ciega leyendo braille.” - Clive Barker
52. “If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set first to his clothing one night.” - H.P. Lovecraft
53. “It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.” - H.P. Lovecraft
54. “It had been a bad trip ... fast and wild in some moments, slow and dirty in others, but on balance it looked like a bummer. On my way back to San Francisco, I tried to compose a fitting epitaph. I wanted something original, but there was no escaping the echo of Mistah Kurtz' final words from the heart of darkness: "The horror! The horror! ... Exterminate all the brutes!” - Hunter S. Thompson
55. “Hello, Kanta. They're saying interesting things about you on the news," she said. "I wondered if you'd survived.""He didn't," I said. "I killed him."Silence."I killed Mkhai, too," I said. "Tens of thousands of years, gone in the blink of an eye.""Why are you telling me this?" asked the voice."Because you're next," I said. "I'm the demon slayer. Come and get me.” - Dan Wells
56. “The zombie looks like a man, walks like a man, eats and otherwise functions fully, yet is devoid of the spark. It represents the nagging doubt that lays deep in the heart of even the most zealous believer: behind all of your pretty songs and stained glass, this is what you really are. Shambling meat. Our true fear of the zombie was never that its bite would turn us into one of them. Our fear is that we are already zombies.” - David Wong
57. “His eyes burned with intensity. I wondered briefly if someonehe knew was being held in that cold room that smelled like death. Someone he loved?” - Jaye Wells
58. “You’d have been scared too if that big troglodyte had put his hands on you. He smelled like dirty socks and store brand cola.” Chet Andrews” - Aaron Crabill
59. “I’m not a big fan of Halloween. Except for the dressing up part. I love picking out a costume. - Tory” - Matthew Leeth
60. “Allow the power to flow through you. Don’t try to capture it. You wish only to borrow it.” - G.G. Collins
61. “The thing, whatever it was - and no one was ever sure afterwards whether it was a dream or a fit or what - happened at that peculiar hour before dawn when human vitality is at its lowest ebb. The Blue Hour they sometimes call it, l'heure bleue - the ribbon of darkness between the false dawn and the true, always blacker than all the rest of the night has been before it. Criminals break down and confess at that hour; suicides nerve themselves for their attempts; mists swirl in the sky; and - according to the old books of the monks and the hermits - strange, unholy shapes brood over the sleeping rooftops.At any rate, it was at this hour that her screams shattered the stillness of that top-floor apartment overlooking the Pare Monceau. Curdling, razor-edged screams that slashed through the thick bedroom door. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")” - Cornell Woolrich
62. “But it bothers you. It pisse you off that I'm not crippled with debt or saddled with some moody bitch. Instead, you PR your lives and act like I'm supposed to ency you.....” - Adam Neville
63. “Then, idly scratching his nose, he walks to the bookcase in the living room and stoops before a set of drab brown Victorian volumes gathering dust on the second shelf from the bottom. How amusing, he thinks, as he withdraws one of them-amusing that a key to dark and ancient rites should survive in such innocuous-looking form.A young fool like Freirs would probably refuse to believe it. Like the rest of his doomed kind, he'd probably expect such lore to be found only in ancient leather-bound tomes with gothic lettering and portentously sinister titles. He'd search for it in mysterious old trunks and private vaults, in the "restricted" sections of libraries, in intricately carved wood chests with secret compartments.But there are no real secrets, the Old One knows. Secrets are ultimately too hard to conceal. The keys to the rites that will transform the world are neither hidden nor rare nor expensive. They are available to anyone. You can find them on the paperback racks or in any second-hand bookshop.” - T.E.D. Klein
64. “Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure.” - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
65. “I tried to say something cool, wound up stammering something like, “WANNA YOU WANNA WEENIE ME?” The end kind of trailed off in a shrill, choking warble.” - David Wong
66. “Welcome to the house of Gray and Graves where we never lie still and death is only the beginning ...” - C.M. Stunich
67. “The door of the judge's house was opened to him by a huge, bearded man who informed the reporter in a conversational tone that if he did not leave the village immediately he would not leave it with his arms unbroken.” - Phil Rickman
68. “It was the kind of scream that would be in a horror movie right before someone got chopped up into little bitty pieces.” - Missy Lyons
69. “There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.” - Mary Shelley
70. “For an instant Harry imagined... Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shut down and told him never to imagine that again.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky
71. “When I am perfect, I will be allowed to leave.” - Damien Walters Grintalis
72. “Eu só sonho horrores hilários.” - Filipe Russo
73. “I live in different worlds. One world where I perform my duty as a part of society. My favorite is my world. The writing's world.” - Ria Tumimomor
74. “ so this is my collection of human body parts, Dr. Silkston," he said proudly, walking into the storeroom. "each organ is here fro a reason, a purpose. you see this one," he said, pointing to a cylinder containing what appeared to Thomas to be a section of a small intestine with a hole in it. "'Tis a duelist's jejunum. that is the bullet hole, right through the middle. and this, this is the Marquis of Rockingham's heart," he announced proudly. " he gave me a permission to have it a fore he died” - Tessa Harris
75. “If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment-still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I've drunk it all!” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov
76. “Horror is a feeling that cannot last long; human nature is incapable of supporting it. Sadness, whether it be from bereavement, or disappointment, or misfortune of any kind may linger on through life” - James De Mille
77. “No wonder that the ghost and goblin stories had a new zest. No wonder that the blood of the more timid grew chill and curdled, that their flesh crept, and their hearts beat irregularly, and the girls peeped fearfully over their shoulders, and huddled close together like frightened sheep, and half-fancied they beheld some impish and malignant face gibbering at them from the darkling corners of the old room. By degrees my high spirits died out, and I felt the childish tremors, long latent, long forgotten, coming over me. I followed each story with painful interest; I did not ask myself if I believed the dismal tales. I listened and fear grew upon me - the blind, irrational fear of our nursery days. ("Horror: A True Tale")” - John Berwick Harwood
78. “I shook with cold and fear, without being able to answer. After a lapse of some moments, I was again called. I made an effort to speak, and then felt the bandage which wrapped me from head to foot. It was my shroud. At last, I managed feebly to articulate, 'Who calls?' 'Tis I' said a voice.'Who art thou?' 'I! I! I!' was the answer; and the voice grew weaker, as if it was lost in the distance; or as if it was but the icy rustle of the trees. A third time my name sounded on my ears; but now it seemed to run from tree to tree, as if it whistled in each dead branch; so that the entire cemetery repeated it with a dull sound. Then I heard a noise of wings, as if my name, pronounced in the silence, had suddenly awakened a troop of nightbirds. My hands, as if by some mysterious power, sought my face. In silence I undid the shroud which bound me, and tried to see. It seemed as if I had awakened from a long sleep. I was cold.I then recalled the dread fear which oppressed me, and the mournful images by which I was surrounded. The trees had no longer any leaves upon them, and seemed to stretch forth their bare branches like huge spectres! A single ray of moonlight which shone forth, showed me a long row of tombs, forming an horizon around me, and seeming like the steps which might lead to Heaven. All the vague voices of the night, which seemed to preside at my awakening, were full of terror. ("The Dead Man's Story")” - Hain Friswell
79. “From this moment on, nothing is what it seems. You're not a human being, you're a character- and filmmakers are doing everything in their power to kill you even now. Supernatural powers and curses are real, and numbers like 666 and 237 can kill you just as easily as a butch knife.Log cabins are slaughterhouses, cornstalks are antennas for evil, and aliens never, ever come in peace.” - Seth Grahame-Smith
80. “Be safe on this wicked night.” - Sandy DeLuca
81. “As a writer, I will go down any dark alley, inch my way through the tightest crawl space, and feed on your every fear. I will take your sense of calm and tear it to shreds. - Horror Author Barbara Watkins” - Barbara Watkins
82. “Death was a living creature. Death was a man tormented by his past. Death was once a human.” - S.K.N. Hammerstone
83. “What is a monster? Something that grows hair all over and howls? Could be. But the real monster is within, and when it comes out, it’s as fugly as you see it, or as it lets you see it.” - John Vamvas Olga Montes
84. “Eu gargalhei até espantar o horror para fora de mim.” - Filipe Russo
85. “The first handkerchief was tied to a second, yellow handkerchief. He fed both through the window and kept pulling. Attached to it was a red one. Then a green one. “Go away, you goddamn clown!” Jenny ordered. But Benny the Clown continued to pull out handkerchief after handkerchief. Five…ten…fifteen…then… That’s not a handkerchief.” - Blake Crouch
86. “These were the things we would never notice were missing.” - Kate Chisman
87. “He stood just near the club’s steps, his back to me along the foggy English night, and it was not until I’d passed him and began my ascent of the many steps that I’d heard his voice. The voice I knew, in all my years of living upon the Earth, that I would never forget. Even then I had known this. It was the slippery way of his tongue, or perhaps it was the coolness of which his words passed across the air and slid its way into my ears as though they were only meant for me.” - S.C. Parris
