He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back.... I must not dwell upon the fearful repast.... Words have no power t...o impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In fear, one flees. One can pretend to fear, accordingly, by pretending to flee, a vigorous activity in which there may be little ...visible difference between pretense and reality. In horror, on the other hand, there is passivity, the passivity of presence. One stands (or sits) aghast, frozen in place, "glued to one's seat." ... Horror involves a helplessness which fear evades. The evasive activities of fear may be pointless, even self-defeating, but they are activities nonetheless, activities that can be feigned. Horror is a spectator's emotion, and thus it is especially well-suited for the cinema and the visual arts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses and... oppresses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families... and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hell is out of fashion--institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the ...gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull.... A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely ex...pandable nature) of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will... always prefer are the most prosaic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »