quote Horror

"Sometimes we all go mad"
- Norman Bates

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"What was the worst thing you've ever done?"
"I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing..."

- Ghost Story

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"You may go wherever you wish in the castle except where the doors are locked, where of course, you will not wish to go."

- Count Dracula to Jonathan Harker

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"Truly effective horror cuts you in half, to use a nice dismemberment metaphor, and then pulls you apart. Ambivalence is at the heart of horror - things that are gruesome can also be strangely compelling. half of you wants to look, or to know, and the other half doesn't. One response is about pleasure and the other about pain, and it is the business of horror to put the two in touch with each other."

- Clive Barker, A-Z of Horror

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"Horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the wester. It is not a kind of fiction...Horror is an emotion"

- Douglas Winter in his introduction to Prime Evil

opening paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill house, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for 80 years and might for 80 more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

- The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

The paragraph is believed to the the single greatest opening paragraph in horror fiction.