Quotes by Arthur Machen

About Arthur Machen:

Arthur Machen is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His novella The Great God Pan (1890; 1894) has garnered a reputation as a classic of horror (Stephen King has called it "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language"). He is also well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the ...

Arthur Machen

Clarke, in the deep folds of dream, was conscious that the path from his father’s house had led him into an undiscovered country, and he was wondering at the strangeness of it all, when suddenly, in place of the hum and murmur of the summer, an inf...

Arthur Machen

Francis Crozier believes in nothing. . It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise. Has it?

Arthur Machen

Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.

Arthur Machen

Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. [...] I did not know what to say to this. Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it's better for a man to stay inside his own mind. Amen, I felt like...

Arthur Machen

He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devo...

Arthur Machen

We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.

Arthur Machen

We have just begun to navigate a strange region; we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils.

Arthur Machen

The words sounded like a mournful incantation.

Arthur Machen

And how are such wars to be waged? The wise prince will begin by assuming the enemy to be infinitely corruptible and infinitely stupid, since stupidity and corruption are the chief characteristics of man. So the prince will make himself friends in th...

Arthur Machen

Now, everybody, I suppose, is aware that in recent years the silly business of divination by dreams has ceased to be a joke and has become a very serious science.

Arthur Machen

It is all nonsense, to be sure; and so much the greater nonsense inasmuch as the true interpretation of many dreams - not by any means of all dreams - moves, it may be said, in the opposite direction to the method of psycho-analysis.

Arthur Machen

If a man dreams that he has committed a sin before which the sun hid his face, it is often safe to conjecture that, in sheer forgetfulness, he wore a red tie, or brown boots with evening dress.

Arthur Machen

Introductions, that is, belong to the masterpieces and classics of the world, to the great and ancient and accepted things; and I am here introducing a short, small story of my own which appeared in The Evening News about ten months ago.

Arthur Machen

Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery.

Arthur Machen

It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.

Arthur Machen

For, usually and fitly, the presence of an introduction is held to imply that there is something of consequence and importance to be introduced.

Arthur Machen

silence is not weakness and decency is not pride

Arthur Machen

I dream in fire but work in clay.

Arthur Machen

There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolutio...

Arthur Machen

Author Bio

  • NameArthur Machen
  • DescriptionWelsh author and mystic
  • BornMarch 3, 1863
  • DiedDecember 15, 1947
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionTranslator; Novelist; Writer