Author: Arthur Machen

Cited by

• Stephen King (1)
  • IN: Just After Sunset (2008) Fiction, Horror, American
    EPIGRAPH: “I can fancy what you saw. Yes; it is horrible enough; but after all, it is an old story, an old mystery played . . . . Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?”
    FROM: The Great God Pan, (1894), Short story, UK
• Elizabeth Hand (1)
  • IN: Black Light (1999) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: And all alone on the hill I wondered what was true. I had seen something very amazing and very lovely, and I knew a story, and if I had really seen it, and not made it up out of the dark, and the black bough, and the bright shining that was mounting up to the sky from over the great round hill, but had really seen it in truth, then there were all kinds of wonderful and lovely and terrible things to think of, so I longed and trembled, and I burned and got cold. And I looked down on the town, so quiet and still, like a little white picture, and I thought over and over if it could be true.
    FROM: The White People, (1904), Short Story, UK