Quotes from Algernon Blackwood

And so with all things: names were vital and important.

A strong emotion, especially if experienced for the first time, leaves a vivid memory of the scene where it occurred.

And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the brain that sent them forth has crumpled into dust, how vitally important it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and guard them with the keenest possible restraint.

It is the little things that pierce and burn and prick for years to come.

My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world.

Both flame and spider enrich themselves by understanding the natures of their prey; and fly and moth return again and again until this is accomplished.

To trace the unfamiliar to the familiar ... is to understand.

I can work with passion because it is creative, but not with lust, for it is destructive only.

Any one who sits in reverie thus, of course, may see similar ridiculous pictures when the will no longer guides construction. The incongruities of dreams are thus explained.

For he did not realize that fear is simply suppressed desire, vivid signs of life, and that desire is the ultimate causative agent everywhere and always.

My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world.

The spell of these terrible solitudes ... cannot leave any mind untouched, any mind, that is, possessed of the higher imaginative qualities.

Ritual is the passage way of the soul into the Infinite.

The dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the only sounds audible. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast world of branches nothing stirred. Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might stretch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees.

All my life," he said, "I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region—not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind—where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance

Invention has ever imagination and poetry at its heart.

The bleak splendors of these remote and lonely forests rather overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern quality of the tangled backwoods which can only be described as merciless and terrible, rose out of these far blue woods swimming upon the horizon, and revealed itself. He understood the silent warning. He realized his own utter helplessness.

For beauty was her accident, and while admirable, was not a determining factor.

Our thoughts make spirals in their world.

the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.

It was clear, however, that the woman had in herself some secret source of joy, that she was now an aggressive, positive force, sure of herself, and apparently afraid of nothing in heaven or hell.

He was a man in whom the dreams of God that haunt the soul in youth, though overlaid by the scum that gathers in the fight for money, had not, as with the majority, utterly died the death. - Secret Worship

Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us.

By which I mean that he saw in commonplace events the movement of greater tides than others saw.