H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all.It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.

I was traumatized by the cartoon version of 'The Hobbit.' It's not supposed to be scary, I don't think, but literally I think that's the most scared I've ever been.

Bambi, to a kid, was scary.

One of the things that I share with Bryan Becket is this hole in my childhood memory. There's about five years of my life that's virtually gone. I've thought about it a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that it might be for my own protection that those memories are gone, and maybe I don't want to dredge up those things.

When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape - I remember it all.

I have a long, complicated history with horror.

That’s how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It re-creates some forgotten terror. Something we’d like to think we’ve grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It’s something you’d hoped was healed.

My guess is that fearful events are the hardest to root out. They're the ones we naturally remember the best, after all.

It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.

Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived.

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason... Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.

I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?

That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

The loss of memory isn't always the problem; sometimes--maybe even often--it's the solution.

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.

A girl my age had been murdered in these woods and I'd seen her last terrified moments, watched her bleed to death in this forest. A life like mine had ended here, and it didn't matter how many times I'd seen deaths in movies, it wasn't the same, and I wasn't ever going to forget it.

The trauma of the whole thing has been humbling, and for the first time, I'm a little bit wobbly.

Tell me where are the flashbacks they all warned us would come?

Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.

Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.

They asked us to draw pictures of what we thought men and women look like naked and so I was like, "Get away, I'm doing my weird homework, drawing a naked man and woman." And I can't even draw. That's all I remember. I have no memory.