When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.

Algernon Blackwood

Categorized in : Darkness Imagination Suggestions

The wise are silent, the foolish speak, and the children are thus led astray, for wisdom is not knowledge, it is a realization of the scheme and of one's own part in it.

Algernon Blackwood

confused wise children

Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but 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.

Algernon Blackwood

adventure past fall

Not easily may an individual escape the deep slavery of the herd.

Algernon Blackwood

slavery individual may

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.

Algernon Blackwood

stars imagination world

Time is measured by the quality and not the quanity of sensations it contains.

Algernon Blackwood

sensations quality

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

Algernon Blackwood

infinite soul way

The best match in the world will not light a candle unless the wick be first suitably prepared.

Algernon Blackwood

preparation light firsts

I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed

Algernon Blackwood

proof standards reality

No place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the walls of memory.

Algernon Blackwood

yield wall memories

It is, alas, chiefly the evil emotions that are able to leave their photographs on surrounding scenes and objects and whoever heard of a place haunted by a noble deed, or of beautiful and lovely ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon?

Algernon Blackwood

moon evil beautiful

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.

Algernon Blackwood

dust heart long

But the wicked passions of men's hearts alone seem strong enough to leave pictures that persist the good are ever too luke-warm.

Algernon Blackwood

passion strong heart

No man can describe to another convincingly wherein lies the magic of the woman who ensnares him.

Algernon Blackwood

magic men lying

To the Sabbath! To the Sabbath!' they cried. 'On to the Witches' Sabbath!" Up and down that narrow hall they danced, the women on each side of him, to the wildest measure he had ever imagined, yet which he dimly, dreadfully remembered, till the lamp on the wall flickered and went out, and they were left in total darkness. And the devil woke in his heart with a thousand vile suggestions and made him afraid.

Algernon Blackwood

wall darkness heart

The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings.

Algernon Blackwood

dark dream book

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

Algernon Blackwood

things important all-things names

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

Algernon Blackwood

burn things little-things years

His imagination conceived and bore - worlds; but nothing in these worlds became alive until he discovered its true and living name. The name was the breath of life; and, sooner or later, he invariably found it.

Algernon Blackwood

name nothing imagination life

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

Algernon Blackwood

memory emotion strong time

My unworldliness, even at 21, was abnormal. Not only had I never smoked tobacco nor touched alcohol of any description, but I had never yet set foot inside a theatre, or gone to a race course I had never seen, nor held a billiard cue, nor touched a card.

Algernon Blackwood

never alcohol theatre race