Home > Author > Clark Ashton Smith
1 " Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams. "
― Clark Ashton Smith , The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith
2 " peregrinations "
― Clark Ashton Smith , The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies
3 " Must beauty blossom, rooted in decay,And night devour its flaming hues alway? "
4 " For thin is the veil betwixt man and the godless deep. The skies are haunted by that which it were madness to know; and strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies. Unnameable things have come to us in alien horror and will come again. And the evil of the stars is not as the evil of earth. "
― Clark Ashton Smith , The Beast Of Averoigne
5 " And it irritated me beyond all measure that a thought so enormous and ludicrous should return when my logic had dismissed it. "
― Clark Ashton Smith
6 " There have been times when only a hair's-breadth has intervened betwixt myself and the seething devil-ridden world of madness; for the hideous knowledge, the horror- blackened memories which I have carried so long, were never meant to be borne by the human intellect. "
7 " Not as the plants and flowers of Earth, growing peacefully beneath a simple sun, were the blossoms of the planet Lophai. Coiling and uncoiling in double dawns; tossing tumultuously under vast suns of jade green and balas-ruby orange; swaying and weltering in rich twilights, in aurora-curtained nights, they resembled fields of rooted serpents that dance eternally to an other-worldly music. "
― Clark Ashton Smith , Lost Worlds
8 " Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;I crown me with the million-colored sunOf secret worlds incredible, and takeTheir trailing skies for vestment when I soar,Throned on the mounting zenith, and illumeThe spaceward-flown horizons infinite. "
9 " All human thought, all science, all religion, is the holding of a candle to the night of the universe. "
― Clark Ashton Smith , The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith
10 " Stern and white as a tomb, older than the memory of the dead, and built by men or devils beyond the recording of myth, is the mansion in which we dwell. "
― Clark Ashton Smith , The Return Of The Sorcerer: The Best Of Clark Ashton Smith
11 " Only the impossible has any real charm; the possible has been vulgarized by happening too often. "
12 " in the days when the world begins to bleach and shrivel, and the sun is blotched with death. Socialist and Individualist, they'll all be a little dirt lodged deep in the granite wrinkles of the globe's countenance. "
13 " To destroy wonder and mystery, is to destroy the only elements that make existence tolerable. "
14 " To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one's own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as "incest." What we need is less "human interest," in the narrow sense of the term—not more. Physiological—and even psychological analysis—can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. Fiction, as I see it, is not the place for that sort of grubbing. "
15 " The skies are haunted by that which it were madness to know; and strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies. Unnamable things have come to us in alien horror and will come again. "
16 " Upon the delicate chin you turnedVenus had set her cloven sign.Like embers seen through darkest wineYour unextinguished tresses burned. "
17 " Tell me tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love, in orbs whereto our sun is a nameless star, or unto which its rays have never reached. "
― Clark Ashton Smith , The End of the Story
18 " But here, is this place of eternal bareness and solitude, it seemed that life could never have been. The stark, eroded stones were things that might have been reared by the toil of the dead, to house the monstrous ghouls and demons of primal desolation. "
― Clark Ashton Smith , The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis
19 " Psychoanalysis and dianetics are, on the face of it, both absurd. People are what they are because of causes that go infinitely farther back than infancy of the mother's womb "
20 " My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation. "
