Robert E. Howard Quotes

A long bow and a strong bow, and let the sky grow dark!
The cord to the nock, the shaft to the ear, and the king of Koth for a mark!

I have never yet done a man to death by torture, but by God, sir, you tempt me!

That is why it would be better for you to cut that girl’s throat with your saber, before the men of Xuthal waken and catch her. They will put her through paces she never dreamed of! She is too soft to endure what I have thrived on. I am a daughter of Luxur, and before I had known fifteen summers I had been led through the temples of Derketo, the dusky goddess, and had been initiated into the mysteries. Not that my first years in Xuthal were years of unmodified pleasure! The people of Xuthal have forgotten more than the priestesses of Derketo ever dreamed. They live only for sensual joys. Dreaming or waking, their lives are filled with exotic ecstasies, beyond the ken of ordinary men.” “Damned degenerates!” growled Conan. “It is all in the point of view,” smiled Thalis lazily.

Now I gazed upon him, no longer in a passionate frenzy, but in a cold contempt. I visualized long days and nights of vengeance, of fiendish ingenuity and complete consummation. My enemy was at my mercy; he lived; all the plans of hate and torture I had conceived through the long years of wrong and insult I would wreak upon him. My plans were carefully laid; I knew exactly what tortures I would use, how long I could inflict them without causing death, until my enemy at last went forth, a man ruined of soul and body. I was at peace, and content.

This day you become knights! he laughed fiercely, pointing with his dripping sword towards the hillmen horses, herded nearby. "Mount and follow me to hell!

If I was wealthy I'd never do anything but poke around in ruined cities all over the world - and probably get snake-bit.

passed on by the hook-nosed herdsmen of the grasslands, from the dwellers in tents to the dwellers in the squat stone cities where kings with curled blueblack beards worshipped round-bellied gods with curious rites.

Sink white fangs in the throat of Life,
Lap up the red that gushes
In the cold dark gloom of the bare black stones,
In the gorge where the black wind rushes.
Slink where the titan boulders poise
And the chasms grind thereunder,
Over the mountains black and bare
In the teeth of the brooding thunder.
Why should we wish for the fertile fields,
Valley and crystal fountain?
This is our doom — the hunger-trail,
The wolf and the storm-stalked mountain.
Over us stalk the bellowing gods
Where the dusk and the twilight sever;
Under their iron goatish hoofs
They crunch our skulls forever.
Mercy and hope and pity — all,
Bubbles the black crags sunder;
Hunger is all the gods have left
And the death that lurks thereunder.
Glut mad fangs in the blood of Life
To slake the thirst past sating,
Before the blind worms mouth our bones
And the vulture's beak is grating.

That's the way with civilized men. When they can't explain something by their half-baked science, they refuse to believe it.

Someday, when all your civilization and science are likewise swept away, your kind will pray for a man with a sword.