Clark Ashton Smith Quotes

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Bow down, I am the emperor of dreams.
Clark Ashton Smith (The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith)
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.
Clark Ashton Smith
Only the impossible has any real charm; the possible has been vulgarized by happening too often.
Clark Ashton Smith
All human thought, all science, all religion, is the holding of a candle to the night of the universe.
Clark Ashton Smith (The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith)
Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; I crown me with the million-colored sun Of secret worlds incredible, and take Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar, Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.
Clark Ashton Smith (The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poetry of Clark Ashton Smith)
Stern and white as a tomb, older than the memory of the dead, and built by men or devils beyond the recording of myth, is the mansion in which we dwell.
Clark Ashton Smith (The Return of the Sorcerer: The Best of Clark Ashton Smith)
Must beauty blossom, rooted in decay, And night devour its flaming hues alway?
Clark Ashton Smith (The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies)
Not as the plants and flowers of Earth, growing peacefully beneath a simple sun, were the blossoms of the planet Lophai. Coiling and uncoiling in double dawns; tossing tumultuously under vast suns of jade green and balas-ruby orange; swaying and weltering in rich twilights, in aurora-curtained nights, they resembled fields of rooted serpents that dance eternally to an other-worldly music.
Clark Ashton Smith (Lost Worlds)
To destroy wonder and mystery, is to destroy the only elements that make existence tolerable.
Clark Ashton Smith (The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith)
in the days when the world begins to bleach and shrivel, and the sun is blotched with death. Socialist and Individualist, they'll all be a little dirt lodged deep in the granite wrinkles of the globe's countenance.
Clark Ashton Smith
Upon the delicate chin you turned Venus had set her cloven sign. Like embers seen through darkest wine Your unextinguished tresses burned.
Clark Ashton Smith
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.
Clark Ashton Smith
Tell me tales of inconceivable fear and unimaginable love, in orbs whereto our sun is a nameless star, or unto which its rays have never reached.
Clark Ashton Smith (The End Of The Story)
Yet from thy lethal lips and thine alone, Love would I drink, as dew from poison-bloom.
Clark Ashton Smith
Psychoanalysis and dianetics are, on the face of it, both absurd. People are what they are because of causes that go infinitely farther back than infancy of the mother's womb
Clark Ashton Smith (The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith)
It would seem, from this, that the people of Omanorion had mastered the ultra-civilized art of minding their own business.
Clark Ashton Smith (The End Of The Story)
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.
Clark Ashton Smith (The Star-Treader and other poems)
But here, is this place of eternal bareness and solitude, it seemed that life could never have been. The stark, eroded stones were things that might have been reared by the toil of the dead, to house the monstrous ghouls and demons of primal desolation.
Clark Ashton Smith (Vaults of Yoh Vombis (The Unexpurgated Clark Ashton Smith Ser.))
To me, the best, if not the only function of imaginative writing, is to lead the human imagination outward, to take it into the vast external cosmos, and away from all that introversion and introspection, that morbidly exaggerated prying into one's own vitals—and the vitals of others—which Robinson Jeffers has so aptly symbolized as "incest." What we need is less "human interest," in the narrow sense of the term—not more. Physiological—and even psychological analysis—can be largely left to the writers of scientific monographs on such themes. Fiction, as I see it, is not the place for that sort of grubbing.
Clark Ashton Smith
The torture-wheel shall serve him even as these horses from Hell have served my blood-red lilies of Sotar and my vein-colored irises of Naat and my orchids from Uccastrog which were purple as the bruises of love.
Clark Ashton Smith
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.
Clark Ashton Smith
Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner, and August Derleth),
Stephen King (Fairy Tale)
In one picture, the pool was half hidden by a fringe of mace- weeds, and the dead willow was leaning across it at a prone, despondent angle, as if mysteriously arrested in its fall towards the stagnant waters. Beyond, the alders seemed to strain away from the pool, exposing their knotted roots as if in eternal effort. In the other drawing, the pool formed the main portion of the foreground, with the skeleton tree looming drearily at one side. At the water's farther end, the cat-tails seemed to wave and whisper among themselves in a dying wind; and the steeply barring slope of pine at the meadow's terminus was indicated as a wall of gloomy green that closed in the picture, leaving only a pale of autumnal sky at the top. ("Genius Loci")
Clark Ashton Smith (American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps)
Having to amuse myself during those earlier years, I read voraciously and widely. Mythic matter and folklore made up much of that reading—retellings of the old stories (Mallory, White, Briggs), anecdotal collections and historical investigations of the stories' backgrounds—and then I stumbled upon the Tolkien books which took me back to Lord Dunsany, William Morris, James Branch Cabell, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake and the like. I was in heaven when Lin Carter began the Unicorn imprint for Ballantine and scoured the other publishers for similar good finds, delighting when I discovered someone like Thomas Burnett Swann, who still remains a favourite. This was before there was such a thing as a fantasy genre, when you'd be lucky to have one fantasy book published in a month, little say the hundreds per year we have now. I also found myself reading Robert E. Howard (the Cormac and Bran mac Morn books were my favourites), Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and finally started reading science fiction after coming across Andre Norton's Huon of the Horn. That book wasn't sf, but when I went to read more by her, I discovered everything else was. So I tried a few and that led me to Clifford Simak, Roger Zelazny and any number of other fine sf writers. These days my reading tastes remain eclectic, as you might know if you've been following my monthly book review column in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I'm as likely to read Basil Johnston as Stephen King, Jeanette Winterson as Harlan Ellison, Barbara Kingsolver as Patricia McKillip, Andrew Vachss as Parke Godwin—in short, my criteria is that the book must be good; what publisher's slot it fits into makes absolutely no difference to me.
Charles de Lint
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.
Clark Ashton Smith (The Beast Of Averoigne)
quinquangular
Clark Ashton Smith (The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies)
peregrinations
Clark Ashton Smith (The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies)
adipocere of
Clark Ashton Smith (The End Of The Story)
Lunatics with a speculative bent can sometimes stumble overly close to certain guarded cosmic secrets.
Clark Ashton Smith (Schizoid Creator)
Behind each thing a shadow lies; Beauty hath e'er its cost: Within the moonlight-flooded skies How many stars are lost!
Clark Ashton Smith (The Star-Treader and Other Poems)
I was with the first Venusian expedition, under the leadership of Admiral Carfax, in 1977.
Clark Ashton Smith (The End Of The Story)
We don’t know whether they’re going to eat us or elect us for their tribal deities.
Clark Ashton Smith (The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith: The Maze of the Enchanter)
It seems to me that I have lived alone— Alone, as one that liveth in a dream: As light on coldest marble, or the gleam Of moons eternal on a land of stone, The dawns have been to me. I have but known The silence of a frozen land extreme— A sole attending silence, all supreme As is the sea’s enormous monotone. Upon the icy desert of my days, No bright mirages are, but iron rays Of dawn relentless, and the bitter light Of all-revealing noon.**** Alone, I crave The friendly clasp of finite arms, to save My spirit from the ravening Infinite.
Clark Ashton Smith (Ebony and Crystal: Poems in Verse and Prose)
Nothing is stupider than the common complaint that poetry lacks "human interest," unless it concerns itself with human emotions, actions, problems and viewpoints. Anything conceivable by the imagination, any speculation ((conception)) ((emergence)) of what may be beyond, above and beneath the mundane sphere, can ((or may,)) possess "human interest," by enlarging the horizons of that interest.
Clark Ashton Smith (The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith)
The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world’s rim; and strange winds, blowing from a gulf no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the grey dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark orb-like mountains which rise from its wrinkled and pitted plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids. - The Abominations of Yondo
Clark Ashton Smith (The Abominations of Yondo)
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.
Clark Ashton Smith
He heard an eery, dry whispering whose source and distance he could not at once determine. Sometimes it seemed at his very ear, and then it ebbed away as if sinking into profound subterranean vaults. But the sound, though variable in this manner, never ceased entirely; and it seemed to shape itself into words that the listener almost understood: words that were fraught with the hopeless sorrow of a dead man who had sinned long ago, and had repented his sin through black sepulchral ages.
Clark Ashton Smith
Within, there were several ponderous brazen-bound volumes of medieval date, a thin manuscript of yellowing parchment, and two portraits whose faces had been turned to the wall, as if it were unlawful for even the darkness of the sealed closet to behold them.
Clark Ashton Smith (The End Of The Story)
White spiders, demon-headed and large as monkeys, had woven their webs in the hollow arches of the bones; and they swarmed out interminably as Nushain approached; and the skeleton seemed to stir and quiver as they seethed over it abhorrently and dropped to the ground before the astrologer. Behind them others poured in a countless army, crowding and mantling every ossicle.
Clark Ashton Smith
The Skeleton: We have wisdom, if you like—a dull and dusty wisdom, and I would give it all for a good draught of Chian wine.4 Perchance ’tis something to know that bodies are made of dust and water, the last of which is evaporable, and the former capable of dissolvement. For this is all our knowledge, in spite of much that is known and spoken of hierophant and philosopher. However, unlike the lore and wisdom of these, it may be contained without discommodation by one skull.
Clark Ashton Smith (The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies)
It was mossed and lichened with antiquity; and there was a hint of beginning dilapidation in the time-worn stone of the walls. The formal garden had gone a little wild from neglect; the trimmed hedges and trees had taken on fantastic sprawling shapes; and evil, poisonous weeds had invaded the flower-beds. There were statues of cracked marble and verdigris-eaten bronze amid the shrubbery; there were fountains that had long ceased to flow; and dials on which the foliage-intercepted sun no longer fell.
Clark Ashton Smith (The End Of The Story)
And it irritated me beyond all measure that a thought so enormous and ludicrous should return when my logic had dismissed it.
Clark Ashton Smith
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.
Clark Ashton Smith
Tell me many tales, O benign maleficent daemon, but tell me none that I have ever heard or have even dreamt of otherwise than obscurely or infrequently. Ney, tell me not of anything that lies between the bourns of time or the limits of space: for I am a little weary of all recorded years and charted lands; and the isles that are westward of Catay, and the sunset realms of Ind, are not remote enough to be made the abiding-place of my conceptions; and Atlantis is over-new for my thought to sojourn there, and Mu itself has gazed upon the sun in aeons that are to recent.
Clark Ashton Smith (The End of the Story)
the people were steeped in the crepuscular gloom of antiquity; and were wise with all manner of accumulated lore; and were subtle in the practice of strange refinements, of erudite perversities, of all that can shroud with artful opulence and grace and variety the bare uncouth cadaver of life, or hide from mortal vision the leering skull of death.
Clark Ashton Smith (The End Of The Story)
Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the watchful gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished, and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.
Clark Ashton Smith (The End Of The Story)
It is regrettable," resumed Azédarac, "that any question of my holiness and devotional probity should have been raised among the clergy of Averoigne. But I suppose it was inevitable sooner or later— even though the chief difference between myself and many other ecclesiastics is, that I serve the Devil wittingly and of my own free will, while they do the same in sanctimonious blindness.
Clark Ashton Smith (The Return Of The Sorcerer: The Best Of Clark Ashton Smith)
In a less scientific age he would have been a devil-worshiper, a partaker in the abominations of the Black Mass; or he would have given himself to the study and practice of sorcery. His was a religious soul that had failed to find good in the scheme of things; and lacking it, was impelled to make of evil itself an object of secret reverence. - The Devotee of Evil
Clark Ashton Smith (The Return Of The Sorcerer: The Best Of Clark Ashton Smith)
A PRECEPT With words of ivory, Of bronze, of ebony, Of alabaster, marble, steel, and gold, The beauty of the visible is told. But how with these express The unseen Loveliness— Splendour and light, and harmony, and sound, The heart hath felt, the sense hath never found? No shining words of stone— Shadow and cloud alone— These shall the poet seek eternally, Whose lines would carve the mask of Mystery.
Clark Ashton Smith (Ebony and Crystal (Treasure Trove Classics))
Here we shall find none or little of the sentimental fat with which so much of our literature is larded. Rather shall one in Imagination’s “misty mid-region,” see elfin rubies burn at his feet, witch-fires glow in the nearer cypresses, and feel upon his brow a wind from the unknown. The brave hunters of fly-specks on Art’s cathedral windows will find little here for their trouble, and both the stupid and the over-sophisticated would best stare owlishly and pass by: here are neither kindergartens nor skyscrapers. But let him who is worthy by reason of his clear eye and unjaded heart wander across these borders of beauty and mystery and be glad. GEORGE STERLING. San Francisco, October 28, 1922.
Clark Ashton Smith (Ebony and Crystal (Treasure Trove Classics))
Algernon Blackwood, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, William Hope Hodgson, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith,
Matt Ruff (Lovecraft Country)
Malygris turned to the viper and spoke in a tone of melancholy reproof: “Why did you not warn me?” “Would the warning have availed?” was the counter-question. “All knowledge was yours, Malygris, excepting this one thing; and in no other way could you have learned it.” “What thing?” queried the magician. “I have learned nothing except the vanity of wisdom, the impotence of magic, the nullity of love, and the delusiveness of memory… Tell me, why could I not recall to life the same Nylissa whom I knew, or thought I knew?” “It was indeed Nylissa whom you summoned and saw,” replied the viper. “Your necromancy was potent up to this point; but no necromantic spell could recall for you your own lost youth or the fervent and guileless heart that loved Nylissa, or the ardent eyes that beheld her then. This, my master, was the thing that you had to learn.
Clark Ashton Smith (The End Of The Story)
When All Is Done”—Paul Laurence Dunbar “The Wanderings of Oisin”—William Butler Yeats “The Cloud-Islands”—Clark Ashton Smith “love is more thicker than forget”—E. E. Cummings “Hymn to the North Star”—William Cullen Bryant “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun”—Walt Whitman “The Young Man’s Song”—William Butler Yeats “If”—Rudyard Kipling “Character of the Happy Warrior”—William Wordsworth
Terah Shelton Harris (One Summer in Savannah)