Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.

She tasted like a Chateau Margaux, perfectly rounded, slightly plumy with an aftertaste of ripe berries.

She will have brown eyes that say everything I ever need to know without her having to speak. She will be beyond extraordinary. She is beyond extraordinary. I will give her everything she ever wanted....

Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories – most included in this volume – which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller...

Honestly, I’d rather be anywhere else. Even home, where my dad begins almost every conversation with, “You should lose the black clothes and wear something with color.” Puh-lease. Like I want to look like every...

Sometimes I felt the bloated Toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapours of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom: Sometimes the quick cold Lizard rouzed me leaving his slimy track upon...

Even I don’t know myself… In fact, I don’t know if I really have a self at all, as I’m constantly playing different roles and pretending – not so much on stage as in real...

The beauty of a woman is that no two are the same. They are all different. It follows then that to be successful as a lover, you cannot make love to any two in the...

I imagined her poised, a humerus in one hand, a toothbrush in the other, as she gently brushed away the last remnants of the person who had once used that arm to shake hands, open...

And Mother, I love her dearly, but she flies into a panic whenever I mention women’s rights. As she sees it, it will be so much more difficult to marry me off if I am...

Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the...

Insane love.Loving insanity.Insanity and love…

Our very existence refuses your laws andyour science, your religions and yourphilosophies.

To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constpatory too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.

There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomachin a hangman’s noose. It is this same lack in noise that lives, there! in thedarkness of the grave, how it frightens...

Good evening, you poor little Orphans of a Loveless God. Good evening to you blood sucking fools.

We’re in high school. If it didn’t come from the school cafeteria, we like it.

And so the afternoon stretched on, and Ezbon toasted their imminent defeat to the dregs.

I fear only that you will be taken away by the hands of the vampire hunter, and only then, will I fall.

Open your eyes, Ambrosio, and be prudent. Hell is your lot; You are doomed to eternal perdition; Nought lies beyond your grave but a gulph of devouring flames.

You know what, your imagination works faster than your mind.

They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and...

In the distance, steel-blue mountains loomed heavy on the horizon, their shoulders burdened with the same accursed snow the gods were currently depositing upon the lowlands. Between us and the mountains, the vast expanse of...

I came from across the ocean and through the wilderness and landed here and found you hiding behind a tapestry. My fate was sealed at the sight of your stockinged feet.~Viktor von Strassenberg

Some believe that every library looks like a splendid cemetery of human thoughts and ideas. Could librarians be called grave-diggers? However that may be, like a cemetery, a library will never stop being of use.

I always am in a role, lovely – for you, for them – even for myself. Yeah… Even when I’m alone, I am still in a role – and I myself am the most exacting...

Time is tick, tick, ticking away. How many souls will I capture today? Will they be a challenge or will they be given? Only time will tell as the clock keeps tick, tick, ticking. Your...

grow a girl up quick”; it was only last november that she turned seventeen.

History doesn’t start with a tall buildingand a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is takingus for suckers and is playing a mean game.

Strength and victory… What he would never praise himself for, but whose loss was his most obsessive fear.

Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author’s ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to...

Can you look at this brilliant wound?

I envy people that know love. That have someone who takes them as they are.

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

In those few words you’ve summed up my life – my reason for existence. It’s you. Any pain I’ve suffered, the mistakes I’ve made, the path laid out for me have all led here –...

The past had already been dealt with, to one end or another, it was certain, fixed, the horror of it was already over.For the living at least. They grieved, yes, but they were not trapped...

Viktor, what?

There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.

Gray.The overcast skies had the colour of deadened stones, and seemed closer than usually, as though they were phlegmatically observing my every movement with their apathetic emptily blue-less eyes; each tiny drop of hazy rain...

He who writes is the martyr, seen through the eyes of the unsuspecting doll.

Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed there must be evil.

—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… acopper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.

Everybody is equally weak on the inside, just that some present their ruins as new castles and become kings –

I spend my nights thinking the worstAnd telling myself that everything’s going to work outI keep kicking myself in the mouthOpening up every cut that should be a scar by now

Shirley Jackson’s writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature.

But to die as lovers may – to die together, so that they may live together.

They’re straight from the underworld, by the way. They are everlasting. They won’t die.

So, apart from casting runes, what other hobbies do you have? Forbidden rituals, human sacrifices, torturing? –

I’m yours, for eternity!