Robert E. Howard Quotes

Verily, the star of Azrael hovers over the birth of a beautiful woman, the King of the Dead laughs aloud, and ravens whet their black beaks.

Aye, you white dog, you are like all your race; but to a black man gold can never pay for blood.

The thing was not a human — it could not be; it was a growth of Life from the pits of blasphemous creation — a perversion of evolutionary development.

Springing back, sword high, he saw the horror strike the floor, wheel and scuttle toward him with appalling speed – a gigantic black spider, such as men see only in nightmare dreams.

Also, there was a rape over in the Cisco country. Man about forty and a girl about five. They didnt hang him. A guy can get away with nearly anything in this part of the country.

When my fictional characters can’t slash and slog and litter the pages with one another’s carcasses, I’m an utter flop as a tale-spinner.

Did you deem yourself strong because you were able to twist the heads off civilised folk, poor weaklings with muscles like rotten string? Hell! Break the neck of a wild Cimmerian bull before you call yourself strong.

The King is only a slave like yourself, locked with heavier chains.

When I look down the vista of the years, with all the "improvements," "inventions" and "progress" that they hold, I am infinitely thankful that I am no younger. I could wish to be older, much older. Every man wants to live out his life's span. But I hardly think life in this age is worth the effort of living. I'd like to round out my youth; and perhaps the natural vitality and animal exuberance of youth will carry me to middle age. But good God, to think of living the full three score years and ten!

I have a faculty of memorizing any song or poem as I hear it, many, especially the old Scotch and Irish ballads I heard my grandmother sing when I was but a child.

Stand up naked in the storm! Shake back your mane and face the thunders and the giant winds that roar between the worlds. Face the rush of events, the gigantic Truths, the dizzying realities. Be one with the tempests, the roaring ocean, and the swirling constellations.

A Thunder of Trumpets

The five-foot blade crushed Strabonus' casque and skull, and the king's charger reared screaming, hurling a limp and sprawling corpse from the saddle. A great cry went up from the host, which faltered and gave back.

I saw that — that black thing squatting like an ape among the branches, leering down at me.

All fled — all done, so lift me on the pyre — The Feast is over, and the lamps expire.

First there was the blackness of an utter void, with the cold winds of cosmic space blowing through it. Then shapes, vague, monstrous and evanescent, rolled in dim panorama through the expanse of nothingness, as if the darkness were taking material form. The winds blew and a vortex formed, a whirling pyramid of roaring blackness. From it grew Shape and Dimension; then suddenly, like clouds dispersing, the darkness rolled away on either hand and a huge city of dark green stone rose on the bank of a wide river, flowing through an illimitable plain. Through this city moved beings of alien configuration.