31 Quotes by Clark Ashton Smith

Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams.

The skies are haunted by that which it were madness to know; and strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies. Unnamable things have come to us in alien horror and will come again.

Behind each thing a shadow lies;Beauty hath e'er its cost:Within the moonlight-flooded skiesHow many stars are lost!

And it irritated me beyond all measure that a thought so enormous and ludicrous should return when my logic had dismissed it.

It would seem, O Nushain, that you have doubted your own horoscope,' said the guide, with a certain irony. 'However, even a bad astrologer, on occasion, may read the heavens aright. Obey, then, the stars that decreed your journey.

For thin is the veil betwixt man and the godless deep. The skies are haunted by that which it were madness to know; and strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies. Unnameable things have come to us in alien horror and will come again. And the evil of the stars is not as the evil of earth.

Must beauty blossom, rooted in decay,And night devour its flaming hues alway?

Yet from thy lethal lips and thine alone,Love would I drink, as dew from poison-bloom.

The gray mists and the grayer houses were full of the menace of memory: they were like traitorous tombs from which the cadavers of dead hours poured forth to assail me with envenomed fangs and talons.