Quotes on Horror

I hated my part in the charade of murder and horror. My efforts were contributing to the deaths, to the burning alive of children - especially the children. The photographs of young Vietnamese children burned by napalm destroyed me.

Before getting to my mother's house, I would always think of her on the porch or even on the street, sweeping. She had a light way of sweeping, as if removing the dirt were not as important as moving the broom over the ground. Her way of sweeping was symbolic; so airy, so fragile, with a broom she tried to sweep away all the horrors, all the loneliness, all the misery that had accompanied her all her life.

Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for peace at any price? Or the ones who pretend they don't see what's going on around them? The world belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to.

The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.

Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace Worse Things kept happening

But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It's a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life's manifold complexities—its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us.

I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.

If something comes along that is totally outside of horror, fine, but I find there's an immense amount of freedom within the genre.

Horror jolts me when I look at one of you and see a pair of beautiful eyes that make me think your mind might contain a world that could hold me as the bolts shake loose and fly from my frame.

The young know how truly difficult and dreadful youth can be. Their youth is wasted on everyone else, that's the horror. The young have no authority, no respect.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.

All you have to do is hold your first soldier who is dying in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that I can't do anything about it... Then you understand the horror of war.

For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.

Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown horror as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.

Considering what human beings do and have done to human beings (and to other living things as well) ... I can never imagine what the devil people think computers can add to the horrors.

Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.

For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.

I financed and made my own films from the start. My path has been autonomous and independent, so I don't have any horror stories about glass ceilings and expectations and tense studio meetings.