31 Quotes by Clark Ashton Smith

Upon the delicate chin you turnedVenus had set her cloven sign.Like embers seen through darkest wineYour unextinguished tresses burned.

Only the impossible has any real charm; the possible has been vulgarized by happening too often.

There have been times when only a hair’s-breadth has intervened betwixt myself and the seething devil-ridden world of madness; for the hideous knowledge, the horror- blackened memories which I have carried so long, were never meant to be borne by the human intellect.

In his bleak mercy, Death forever strips The soul of light and memory, rendering blind Our vision, lest surmounted deeps appal, As when on mountain-heights a glance behind Betrays with knowledge, and the climber slips Down gulfs of fear to some enormous fall.

All human thought, all science, all religion, is the holding of a candle to the night of the universe.

My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation.

We don’t know whether they’re going to eat us or elect us for their tribal deities.

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.

Lo! I am Beauty’s constant thrall, Must ever on her voice await, And follow through the maze of Fate Her luring, strange and mystical.