Quotes from Algernon Blackwood

Ordinary sounds remain ordinary only so long as one is not listening to them; under the influence of intense listening they become unusual, portentous, and therefore extraordinary.

Punk had in him still the instincts of his dying race; his taciturn silence and his endurance survived; also his superstition.

For one single second I understood clearly that the past and the future exist actually side by side in one immense Present; that it was I who moved to and fro among shifting, protean appearances.

Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!

It is, of course, extremely interesting to look back across the years questioningly, wonderingly, objectively, without detachments, though seeing "objectively" does not necessarily imply seeing truthfully.

The hidden weakness rose-as all else in him was rising-with the Wave. But he did not recognise it. It was akin, perhaps, to that fatuous complacency of the bigoted religionist who, thinking he has discovered absolute truth, looks down from his narrow cell upon the rest of the world with a contemptuous pity that in itself is but the ignorance of crass self-delusion.

This ancient script was graven in his soul.

What we know instinctively," she continued, "is simply what we are trying to remember. Knowledge is memory.

The reflection that this sudden intimacy was unnatural, he rejected, for many conversations, for many conversations were really gathered into one.

The studies that had fascinated his mind in earlier youth returned with the power that had subdued his mind in boyhood.

catching his breath. He felt as if his spine had suddenly become hollow and someone had filled it with particles of ice.

He remembered suddenly how his uncle had told him that men were sometimes stricken with a strange fever of the wilderness, when the seduction of the uninhabited wastes caught them so fiercely that they went forth, half fascinated, half deluded, to their death.

Vance merely echoed the rush of her vital personality.

Fear, to put it plainly, hovered close about that little camp, and though all three would have been glad to speak of other matters, the only thing they seemed able to discuss was this—the source of their fear. They tried other subjects in vain; there was nothing to say about them.

he found all religions uninteresting because, almost without exception, they start from the present and speculate ahead as to what men shall become, instead of looking back and speculating why men have got here as they are.

It is never difficult to credit strangers with the qualities and knowledge that oneself craves for, and no doubt Henriot's active fancy went busily to work.

The inn-keeper's daughter, a little maiden with a simple country loveliness, presently entered with a foaming pewter mug

like a priest's cassock reaching to the feet. It was altogether a lugubrious figure of a man, sinister and funereal, yet it seemed in perfect harmony with the general character of its surroundings.

There was an air of obsequious insolence about the old Jew that was very offensive.

servant if you watch him all the time. You must always stand over a Jew, though, if you want things done properly. They're tricky and uncertain unless they're working for their own interest.

He is Fright!" she said in an awed whisper. "But never talk about him again unless you can help it; he always knows when he's being talked about, and he liked it, because it gives him more power.

As she spoke there rose from the depths of the house the sound of muffled voices, children's voices singing faintly together; it rose and fell exactly like the wind, and with as little tune; it was weird and magical, but so utterly mournful that the boy felt the tears start to his eyes.

She might be a protector, but she was not a real companion; and he knew that somewhere or other he had left a lot of other real companions whom he now missed dreadfully.

he kept himself and his forces well in hand the whole evening, compelling an accumulative reserve of control by that nameless inward process of gradually putting all the emotions away and turning the key upon them—a process difficult to describe, but wonderfully effective, as all men who have lived through severe trials of the inner man well understand.