The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

And all I loved, I loved alone.

There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.