Home > Author > Ramsey Campbell
1 " The corridor didn't seem long enough to contain so much blackness.'Passing Through Peacehaven "
― Ramsey Campbell , Holes for Faces
2 " When he shut himself in his apartment he found that he hoped he was waiting for nothing at all. "
3 " As soon as Todd drove off the motorway it vanished from the mirror, and so did the sun across the moor. "
4 " He hurried back. Walls seemed to shift and advance. Right here, it must be. Wasn’t this passage too short? No, it wasn’t a wall that blocked his way, only fog. The fog retreated before him—then at once yielded up a wall. Staggering crimson letters caught in the web of graffiti spelled KILLER. "
― Ramsey Campbell , The Face That Must Die
5 " He slammed the door and ran blindly down the corridor, grabbing at handles. What exactly had he seen? They had been eating with their bare hands, but somehow the only thought he could hold on to was a kind of sickened gratitude that he had been unable to see their faces. "
― Ramsey Campbell , Alone With the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction, 1961-1991
6 " The crying wailed, somewhere beneath the planks. Several sweeps of the light showed that the cellar was otherwise deserted. Though the face mouthed behind him, he ventured down. For God’s sake, get it over with; he knew he would never dare return. "
7 " Unlike the rest he had seen of the bungalow, the hall beyond the door was dark. He could see the glimmer of three doors and several framed photographs lined up along the walls. The sound of flies was louder, though they didn’t seem to be in the hall itself. Now that he was closer they sounded even more like someone groaning feebly, and the rotten smell was stronger too. "
8 " On Aigburth Road, wind was doing its best to direct the shoppers, but failed to throw Rose under a car. Layer on layer of dark cloud piled up like sediment at the horizon. Against the sky trees glared, bunches of frayed rusty wire. Birds were scraps of light high overhead, in danger of being blown out. Above a church doorway a Virgin and Child were caged by wire netting, which rattled as though they were trying to escape. "
― Ramsey Campbell , The Parasite
9 " I'd forgotten - perhaps preferred to forget - that I'd caved in to the interference of some copy-editor... somebody anonymous whose commitment to finding something wrong would not disgrace an Eastern European clerk. "
― Ramsey Campbell
10 " Tradition is a pretty poor excuse for perpetrating stereotypes. "
11 " One way to avoid what has already been done is to be true to yourself. "
12 " Smile while you can,’ Hettie Close had scrawled in ink almost as faded as the print above it. ‘Smile like the skull you’ll be, you fool, before you’re worse than bones. "
13 " Darkness blinded him. It was heavy on him, and moved. It was more than darkness: it was flesh". "
14 " Perhaps the woman was waiting beneath the lamps for cats to drop from the trees, like fruit. "
15 " She walked Toby to Victoria Station and left him at the barrier. On her way into the underground she thought he’d followed her, but there was nobody to be seen behind her on the escalator that sailed downwards with a faint inconsolable squeal. She sat on a bench on the empty platform, the breaths of oncoming trains stirring the hairs on the back of her neck. She leafed through Graham’s notebook, but couldn’t concentrate; she found she had to keep glancing along the platform towards the tunnel. Some fault in the mechanism made the train doors reopen after she boarded, as if someone had leapt on at the last moment. The galloping rush of the wheels made her think of a hunt in the dark. "
― Ramsey Campbell , Ancient Images
16 " I don’t care much for this homogenised religion, and I told him so. This notion that you mustn’t think your way to faith is obviously not far from the intolerance that leads to burning books. "
― Ramsey Campbell , The Hungry Moon
17 " All day Ben had felt surrounded by signs too secret to interpret: the dance of decaying leaves in the air, the long shadows where the autumn chill lurked like winter biding its time, a sun which looked swollen with blood as the mist dragged it down beyond the unconvincing cut-out shapes the houses had become. "
― Ramsey Campbell , Midnight Sun
18 " horses which drew the hearse, and far more ineffectual. Every open grave I had to stand beside was a gateway to knowledge which nobody other than I appeared to realise was there to be tapped. As mourners dropped earth on the coffin it sounded very much like knocking on a door, and I imagined how terrified the priest and his little congregation would be if any opened in the earth. "
― Ramsey Campbell , The Searching Dead
19 " Everything was real except her. "
20 " As the light wavered into the rooms, they looked impossibly large with darkness, which seemed less still than it ought to be. "
