Epic Dark Fantasy Quotes

I flinched when his hands lifted, although it was more of a reaction to everything that had been happening to me, not necessarily because he was Death. He stilled. "You're sad," he said. "Let me help you."
"There isn't anything you can do."
"I can comfort you. ~ H.D. Smith

You have your orders," Mab shouted at the guards. "To the Deeps with her."
The men led me from the great hall, taking me along a series of corridors to the back of the castle, then winding through another long corridor and into a spiraling stairwell that appeared to have no end. We went further and further down until finally it ended so deep in the ground it felt like a grave. My pulse quickened as we reached the bottom.
A single dark door lay ahead. ~ H.D. Smith

Now she realized that she was not peering at a so-dark-blue-it-looked-black ocean, but rather she was looking straight through miles of incredibly clear water at something enormous and black in its nethermost depths. Maybe it was the bottom
so deep that not even light could touch it.
And yet, down in those impossible depths, she thought she could see tiny lights sparkling. She stared uncertainly at the tiny glimmerings. They seemed almost like scattered grains of sand lit from within; in some places they clustered like colonies, faint and twinkling.
Like stars ... ~ Fuyumi Ono

I had a book that was given to me as a kid that was called 'Faeries.' It was this dark, sinister book with pictures that used to scare me because they were these creepy little creatures. But, I was always really drawn to that fantasy world, more than a sci-fi world, in terms of outer space stuff. ~ Anna Silk

Feeling your body beneath me was the closest to heaven that I shall ever come." He spoke not in a whisper but on an intimate level, his voice rolling like the caress of dark velvet. "Your skin, your mouth, your body, your sweet, sweet moans, and your blood… I want them all. I want quite a bit more, actually. So you best prepare yourself, my lady. Since I'm already damned, I aim to have all of you. I want to see that look of ecstasy on your face over and over again when I'm buried deep inside you and you're screaming my name. ~ Juliette Cross

On the Hunger Games Fan Race fail and the portrayal of POC in fantasy literature:
It is as if the POC in the text are walking around with a great big red sign over them for some editors and it reads I AM NOT A REAL CHARACTER. I AM A PROBLEM YOU MUST DEAL WITH. The white characters are permitted to saunter about with their physical descriptions hanging out all over the place, but best not make mention of dark skin or woolly/curly hair or dark eyes (Unless, of course, that character is white. None of my white-skinned dark-eyed characters had any problem being described as such. And I'm pretty sure that Sól's curly hair never gave anyone a single pause for thought.) As I said, I understand the desire not to define a POC simply by their physical attributes, and I understand cutting physical descriptions if no other character is described physically – but pussyfooting about in this manner with POC is doing nothing but white wash the characters themselves. It's already much too hard to get readers to latch onto the fact that some characters may not be caucasian, why must we dance about their physical description as if it were some kind of shameful dirty little secret. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the way homosexuality used to only ever be hinted at in texts. It was up to the reader to 'read between the lines' or 'its there if you look for it' and all that total bullshit which used to be the norm. ~ Celine Kiernan

And I've learned to hit the brakes at these kinds of stop signs rather than t-boning a tanker truck filled with 200 proof mediocrity. ~ Benjamin Kane Ethridge

In time, all will be well - for all of us."
"You sound as if you truly believe that it will."
"Why shouldn't I? For Arman has given us the end of the story, has he not? Shamayim will be a wonderful home, even if this one remains dark. ~ Jill Williamson

The Oscar is the fantasy that you're afraid to believe in, but in the secrecy of your little dark room, you dream and wait for it. ~ Terrence Howard

In Dark Places,
May we Never be truly Alone.....
~Susan Schroder, Circle the Sun books ~ Susan Schroder

Those monsters in your closets and under your beds? They are just as real as us. The difference is that we fear what we don't understand, while they understand exactly, what we fear. ~ Rob Shepherd

For what was burned at the stakes beyond the fires did endure ~ T. M. Lakomy

I am staring into eyes so dark and compelling that I feel as if I could easily lose myself within them. He moves me slightly away from his body but doesn't let go. Energy, just like in the forest a few nights ago, ebbs and flows betwen us. ~ Jennifer Sucevic

Because I know it in my bones. You are the only female I desire, the only water that will quench my thirst, the only sun that will warm my skin, the only lips that were made for mine. ~ Dannika Dark

Hobbes took the madness of his age, considered it "normal," and projected it back into prehistoric epochs of which he knew next to nothing. What Hobbes called "human nature" was a projection of seventeenth-century Europe, where life for most was rough, to put it mildly. Though it has persisted for centuries, Hobbes's dark fantasy of prehistoric human life is as valid as grand conclusions about Siberian wolves based on observations of stray dogs in Tijuana. ~ Christopher Ryan

You wouldn't know, looking at him, that he'd been to Hell and back. He kept his scars tucked away beneath his clothes and behind his eyelids.
Survivors often do. ~ Angela Panayotopulos

Merik swiveled his wrists slowly. At night, the temple was too dark to see the blood dripping from his arms, pooling on the granite flagstones. He felt it falling, though. Just as he felt the new, burned flesh on his hands stretching beneath torn gloves.
Yet even as pain shivered through his body, he couldn't help but think: Only a fool ignores Noden's gifts. For if Merik looked at this case of mistaken identity from the just the right angle, it could in fact all be seen as boon.
The assassin in the night. The fire on the Jana. The attack of a Waterwitch in Pin's Keep. Each event had led Merik here, to Noden's temple. To a fresco of the god's left hand.
To the Fury.
Twice now, he'd been mistaken for that monstrous demigod, and twice now, it had worked in Merik's favor. So why not continue using the fear invoked from that name? Was Merik not doing the Fury's work by bringing justice to the wronged and punishment to the wicked? It was clear that Nubrevnans needed Merik's help, and his sister Vivia…Well, she was stil out there. Alive. Wretched.
So was it not Merik's moral duty to keep her off the throne? And he could do that if he could just prove she had indeed tried to kill him - that it was she who'd purchased that prisoner from Vizer Linday, and she who'd sent the prisoner to kill Merik.
Yes. This was right. This was Noden's will. It throbbed in Merik's wounds. It shivered across his scalp and down his raw back.
Take the god's gift. Become ~ Susan Dennard

He circled around me, whispering in my ear. "I'm O positive. I'm everyone's type. ~ Dannika Dark

Look, rodent." At least she could still talk.. "Either chop off my ears so I'm not subjected to your verbal projectiles or clench your back passage so you'd stop dumping toxic waste. ~ Auden Johnson

I told you. I've been watching." She twirled, her arms outstretched. "Watching, watching, watching. ~ A.F. Stewart

Death makes its own choices.
Has reasoning an order has a taste ... ~ Angelo Tsanatelis

The deeds of the light do just as much damage as the deeds of the dark.
From Lucifer's Ladder (God of the Fallen: Book One) ~ W.D. Frank

The plan was,we drink untill the pain is over but whats worse,the pain or the hangover? ~ Kanye West

People won't change until the pain of not changing is greater than the pain changing brings. ~ Just B. Jordan

I find that with fantasy, you lose yourself in it a lot. It's great to be able to go into a dark theater or turn off the lights in your house and just get sucked into this world. I remember watching Star Wars when I was a little kid when they did the re-release of all the originals. I couldn't even read yet but my uncle took me and he would read me the opening as the words were coming up on the screen. I just remember being so sucked into that and thinking, "I want to be Luke Skywalker." ~ Austin Butler

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

For those who live in Kashmir, the expectations of justice, rarely fulfilled in the Indian subcontinent, are more than optimistic; they belong to fantasy. It makes it all the more difficult for the victims to bear their human losses. At Dalal's house, the once carefully tended plants and hedges were already running wild just a few weeks after his murder, the fish in the pond were mostly dead, and few men sat slumped on the floor in a bare hall under the Islamic calendar of mourning. His mother, persuaded by her male relatives to emerge from the dark room where she had taken to since her son's death, broke down as soon as she noticed the photos of Dalal I had been studying. The pictures showed a young man in dark glasses and trendy clothes, a happy, contented man, someone who had managed to find, amid the relentless violence of the insurgency, a new style and identity for himself, and when Dalal's mother, still crying, while her mother, Dalal's grandmother, sat beside her, quietly wiping her tears with the frayed end of her headscarf, asked what was the point of talking to the press, of speaking about her son to me- he was gone and wouldn't come back; the people who had killed him were too powerful- it was hard not to feel pierced by the truth of what she was saying, hard not to be moved by her grief, and the pain, amid the great human waste of Kashmir, of her helplessness. ~ Pankaj Mishra

In the end it seems we're just toys, easy to break and hard to mend. ~ Mark Lawrence

I hope when this is done I'll be able to get back into my happy gardening vibe that was so healthy for me. I want to go back to my routine and my morning ritual with the compost, but it will probably be that my life will split in two. New Leaf Gardening in Wood Green will be happening in parallel to a fantasy that runs along the bottom of that screen like a ticker. Alice will be fine. Rabbit will stay up tonight, and every night. Resending and resending, reopening the page to see if she has responded, if anyone has. The spinning wheel will make my eyes hurt and everything else will go dark. ~ Olivia Sudjic

You killed me." My voice was unsteady.

He held me close again. "I brought you back."

"Please tell me we only have to do that once."

He whispered against my ear, "I swear I won't kill you again. Cross my heart and hope to die." It was a bad joke ~ Catrina Burgess

The other dark places,' Evan whispered. Visions of tunnels of earth and stone, caves and streams entered his head. It was far beneath them. He knew it was real and it was down there, waiting. ~ Mary G. Thompson

Sometimes a woman has experienced too much life to have any blush left in her cheeks, but the man who puts it there is someone not easily forgotten. ~ Dannika Dark

This seemed to be happening more and more lately out in Greater Los Angeles, among gatherings of carefree youth and happy dopers, where Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he'd seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everyone else at the psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin. Like the operatives who'd dragged away Coy Harlingen the other night at that rally at the Century Plaza. Doc Knew these people, he'd seen enough of them in the course of business. They went out to collect cash debts, they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat. If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who'd make it happen.
Was it possible, that at every gathering--concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back east, wherever--those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?
'Gee,' he said to himself out loud, 'I dunno... ~ Thomas Pynchon

In an instant, five harlequin-like clowns emerged and began to perform all kinds of acrobatic tricks, encircling us––correction...corralling us. They were graceful but a little creepy too. They were wearing black and white costumes that were form fitting and appeared to move like some psychedelic drug trip when they flipped around. That of course was odd, but not nearly as odd as the chant they were singing as they continued to perform their tricks.
See us dance.
Watch us flip.
Care to take a chance?
We'll only need a sip.
Come to see our mistress?
Or come to see our master?
She can be quite viscous.
But he is a disaster.
We love them both, and we'll let you choose.
Either way, we wouldn't want to be in your shoes. ~ Brynn Myers

I don't understand," Oraeyn whispered hoarsely.
"It is not for us to understand," Ina replied, her face clearing as she listened to Kaitryn. "It is for us to travel to the very edge of the light we are given."
"And then?" Oraeyn asked.
A radiant smile beamed across Kaitryn's face. "And then we jump with swords drawn, a battlecry on our lips, and we beat back the darkness. ~ Jenelle Leanne Schmidt

The word 'fairy' conjures up images of cute little creatures, so I don't use it. I use 'metahominids' from the Greek for 'other' and 'men.' They aren't cute - this is no fairy story. ~ F.R. Maher

Gabrielle chuckled, her dark eyes twinkling. "So he's been after you, has he? Poor Etta, pursued by a sun priest offering to pleasure - "
"Every nook and cranny," Marietta interrupted dryly and Gabrielle tipped her head back with a throaty laugh. ~ Michelle O'Leary

The hours wear on, while the surreal atmosphere of the asylum does not wear off. ~ M.D. Elster

Why is he scared of the dark?"
I meant the words for a joke, but Shade nodded seriously. "Like all monsters. Because it reminds him of what he truly is". ~ Rosamund Hodge

How ironic it is to have your past-self staring at you ~ Mary Gehad

The stranded Daoine Sidhe knights of the Dark Court gathered at the ring of ancient standing stones under the pale light of the harvest moon.
Whenever the Daoine Sidhe gathered, they raised the natural energies of the world around them. ~ Thea Harrison

Beeswax, with its subtle undertones of smoke and honey. The smell of ink on wet paper, the sickly-sweet smell of decay. The sweat of clean bodies, the scent of burnt gloves. She loved the crackle of the fire and the clang of the tools. She loved the magic of sweat-streaked alchemists who blew down metal pipes and created bubbles within molten glass. She loved the flawless final chapter, the glistening undulations as smooth as ice. ~ Angela Panayotopulos

Nothing nice happens to murdered women. ~ Richard Kadrey

The forest smelled fresh here and the ground was soft, carpeted by leaves and fallen pine needles. It was tranquil and enchanting in its way. Ursula was lovely; she just wasn't a naiad. Her hair was dark and sleek, and so long it fell below her waist, swaying this way and that as she walked. Her eyes were a piercing blue, always aware, and she had a keen eye for the smallest details. She may have been a merchant, but she'd also trained as an archer for the city militia, and she could easily spot movement at a distance. That was her intention now; it was just a different kind of movement. ~ Cailee Francis

Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep,
even so I will endure ...
For already have I suffered full much,
and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war.
Let this be added to the tale of those. ~ Homer

A man's greatest treasures are his illusions - Durzo Blint ~ Brent Weeks

Once upon a time, when the earth was formless and empty, and darkness stretched over the surface of the deep, we plunged one another into the abyss, and the world has trembled ever since. ~ A.J. Vrana

There was still a bit of sunshine in the sky, not that it mattered. High treetops and reaching branches entombed us from above in a dark coffin. It was still in the afternoon. We had time to gather things together for camp, but the choked rays that permeated the living casket were sputtering their last bits of life.

- Tyrus Savage narration from ORRLETH, Volume One of the Orrleth Young Adult Fantasy Paranormal Series ~ Thomas McClellan

Loneliness is a long, unbearable pain ... There was never a place for me in the scheme of things ... I had become a living fantasy on a theme in dark, endless dirges ... I made another world, and real men would enter it and they would never really get hurt at all in the vivid, unreal laws of the dream. I caused dreams which caused death. This is my crime. ~ Dennis Nilsen

I don't think I've ever not had a dark side. But one of the wonderful reasons why you go into this business is that half your life you live in a fantasy, which is somebody else's life. It's actually a great release because you're not having to deal with the itty-bitty bits of life. ~ Felicity Kendal

I think when magic is dark enough, it can look like anything it wants. ~ Laura Oliva